They Searched Through Hundreds of Bands to Solve an Online Mystery

For years, a small but heavily engaged community has gathered online, entirely dedicated to the goal of identifying a single elusive song. On Monday, following an exhaustive search, they announced they’d found it.

Now that "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet” has been located, it leaves behind an entire subculture of “lostwave” music that stretches from cassette tapes to Spotify. Even amid their success, many investigators are unsure about what happens to the community now that its goal has been achieved. What happens to lost media once it’s been found?

We now know the song in question is called “Subways of Your Mind” by FEX, but until Monday, it had lived up to its sobriquet for 17 years. The song was recorded off the German radio station NDR in the early ’80s and was just a question mark on a cassette case ...