Viral Video to Pop Charts

I missed the Antoine Dodson “Bed Intruder” meme, until it finally hit the New York Times and was forwarded by some classmates.

Viral videos tend to have a short lifespan online. The best ones might attract a few million views on YouTube and get a mention on a late-night talk show before fading into oblivion.

The Gregory Brothers used footage of Glenn Beck on Fox News in a Web video series called “Auto-Tune the News.”

But in one of the stranger twists in recent pop-music history, a musical remake of a local news clip transcended YouTube fame and reached the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August.

It was a rare case of a product of Web culture jumping the species barrier and becoming a pop hit.

The song’s source material could not have been more unlikely: A local TV news report from Huntsville, Ala., about an intruder who climbed into a woman’s bed and tried to assault her.

But with some clever editing and the use of software that can turn speech into singing, the Gregory Brothers, a quartet of musicians living in Brooklyn, transformed an animated and angry rant by the victim’s brother into something genuinely catchy.

The resulting track, “Bed Intruder Song,” has sold more than 91,000 copies on iTunes, and last week it was at No. 39 on the iTunes singles chart. Its video has been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube.

And to top it off, the song was No. 89 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the week of Aug. 2.

Hat tip to Ben Slotznick and Rodger Kamenetz.