Burn the Goat
- Difficulty
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hard - Rank
- #40
In the Swedish city of Gävle, every December (and this since 1966!) a giant straw goat is built in honour of the traditional « julbock », one of the oldest symbols of Scandinavian Christmas.
However, this construction is regularly the subject of rather amusing news stories: it is illegally burned almost every year! Pro- and anti-goat groups now compete in creativity to protect or set fire to the goat, using increasingly sophisticated strategies. Among the surveillance measures in place, a continuous live stream is broadcast every year so that everyone can keep an eye on it… and watch out for any would-be arsonist!
Question
What is the title of the music played at midnight local time, on the night of 30 to 31 December 2019?
By searching on Google Gävle Goat Livestream, we can find the Youtube channel live streaming the Gävle Goat during December.
However, there’s no livestream replay from 2019 on the channel! If only we could find an archived version somewhere…
How lucky! The Wayback Machine archives almost everything on the internet! Search for the channel URL and look at the results.
There are some capture from 31th December 2019! On the bottom of the page, there’s a list of “Past live streams”. The capture time is 20:33, so the last stream “Streamed 14 hours ago” during 11:37:35 should cover the midnight time we’re looking for.
However, when accessing the archived page of the stream, the only capture of this page didn’t archive the video, thus it is not playable. Bummer.
However again, notice the “Unlisted” tag under the title of the video. That means the video is not private, and can be accessed by anyone with the link. Getting the link from the URL bar, we can try to access the video directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hUjdVKkHro. It works!
Now that we have the video, we need to find the music played at midnight. The local time is writen to the bottom-right corner of the video. At midnight, we can use Shazam to identify the music played. That’s it!
Answer
Up on the Housetop
Alternative - Channel ID
If you had trouble finding the archived channel, that may be caused by the different url structure of Youtube channels.
If the channel you found was https://www.youtube.com/@gavlegoatlive, you can try to get its ID by going to “Share channel” > “Copy channel ID”. This gives UC_521_9yuT-EQqfF7cip2Ig, that you can use to form the url https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_521_9yuT-EQqfF7cip2Ig and search it on Wayback Machine.
Alternative - Finding song
It was also possible to find the song without any song identifier app.
Every music played during the stream is from Youtube Audio Library (so that every song is 100% royalty-free). We could open the Youtube Audio Library, and filter by “Genre: Christmas Song & other party”, then sort by “Date added (oldest)”.
Finally, by listening to every song of a duration around 1:30 (duration of the music played at midnight), we can find the song “Up on the Housetop (Instrumental)” by E’s Jammy Jams, added in December 2014.
Yes, I’m crazy.
Challenge error
The original question of this challenge was:
What is the title of the music played at 5:01 p.m. (local time) during the stream on 31 December 2019?
It was based on the countdown displayed on the livestream for what seemed to be the new year (so midnight). 5:01 p.m. gives 6 hours and 59 minutes before midnight, so at 4:36:XX on the livestream.
However! If we keep the reference point of 0:00:00 countdown being at midnight, the livestream starts with 11:35:55 remaining, so at 12:25 local time. But, the image is already really dark, like if it was nightime. This could be, as northern countries can have really long nights during winter.
However, we can check the sunrise and sunset times for Gävle on 31 December 2019, and it’s full day!
We can even fact-check this with live cameras from arround (archive image from 2025-12-31 at 12:32), and it’s clearly day time!
All of this to say that the countdown on the livestream was targeting 7:00 a.m. (local time) on 1 January 2020, not midnight on 31 December 2019.
Why ? We don’t know. It was indeed midnight for UTC-6 (Central Time), like Chicago, but that makes no sense for a Swedish livestream.