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.

And 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 Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of Everyday Things. I'm Zachary Throckett.

Today, happy birthday to you.

The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, that's ASCAP for short,

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