About a decade ago, Jennifer Nelson was working in the trenches of reality television.

I was a producer at MTV and I was working on a popular show called my super sweet 16.

It was about lavish over-the-top birthdays for wealthy kids and they would spend

hundreds of thousands of dollars on these birthday parties and

arrive in helicopters or you know have elephants on display. Early on she got a confusing mandate from her boss.

My producer was like, you can't film anybody singing the happy birthday song.

Just don't do that. And I was like, what do you mean? This is a show about

birthdays and we can't sing the happy birthday song. Everybody on the crew always

thought it was so dumb, but nobody really looked into it.

So Nelson decided to look into it herself and she found out something that blew her

mind. The song, a song that you and I have sung hundreds, if not thousands of times, a song that

forms a critical part of an American ritual. It was the property of one of the world's

largest music publishers.

To use it, her show would have to pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees.

I just thought it was nuts. I was pissed too. Like doesn't that song belong to everybody?

The more Nelson looked into the history of the world's most familiar song, the more she realized

that the story she'd been told about its ownership was questionable. For the

Freak economics radio network, this is the Economics of Everyday Things.

I'm Zachary Crockett.

Today, happy birthday to you.

The American Society of Composers, authors, and publishers, that's ASCAP for short. Well, they once called it far

and away the most popular song of the 20th century. But before the world knew happy birthday birthday the tune was just an obscure little ditty

...