Baby Shark Boy Says 'I Want People to Hear My Own Voice'

He was seven years old when he danced his way into internet history. Now, a decade on, Park Geonroung — better known to the world as Baby Shark Boy — is stepping back into the spotlight, this time entirely on his own terms.

The young South Korean performer, now 17, will debut as a recording artist under the name Baby Shark Boy, with his first single, WAVE, dropping on 20 August across streaming platforms in Korea and internationally. The track features Joohoney of K-pop boy band Monsta X, and — perhaps most remarkably — Geonroung is credited as a co-writer of the lyrics.

It's a debut that carries more weight than most. The 2016 Pinkfong Baby Shark Dance video — the one Geonroung appeared in as a child — has accumulated more than 17 billion views on YouTube, making it the most-watched clip on the platform by a distance no other video has come close to matching. For context, the second-most-watched video, Cocomelon's Wheels on the Bus, sits at 9.2 billion views. Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee comes in third at 9.1 billion.

That scale of cultural footprint could easily feel like a burden. But according to Pinkfong, the South Korean children's entertainment company behind Baby Shark, the new single leans directly into that strangeness — the surreal experience of re-entering public life a decade after going viral as a small child. Geonroung's lyrics reportedly draw on his own journey through that unusual upbringing.

Musically, WAVE blends a trendy synth-pop beat with an interpolation of the iconic "Baby Shark doo-doo-doo" hook — familiar enough to trigger instant recognition, but reframed in a way that positions Geonroung as a credible pop act rather than a nostalgia act. A 17-second teaser released on Monday showed him singing in both Korean and English, closing the clip with the line: "I'm your boy."

Behind the scenes, this debut represents something of a strategic gamble for The Pinkfong Company. Children's entertainment IP almost never has a real human face attached to it — the genre trades in animated characters and catchy hooks, not individual artists. Pinkfong itself has built its business largely on animated properties, including the recently announced musical series The Big Book of Bebefinn, a new Amazon Kids+ Original.

With Baby Shark Boy, however, the company is explicitly calling this its first artist project — an attempt to take one of the internet's most valuable intellectual properties and build something around a real, growing human talent. It's a calculated pivot, and one that Pinkfong appears to have been quietly preparing for some time. When the company released a short-form clip for Baby Shark's 10th anniversary last year, revisiting the now-grown Geonroung, it pulled in more than 24 million views and one million likes on Instagram alone — a clear signal that the audience was still there, and still curious about the boy who started it all.

The single won't be the only way fans get to follow Geonroung's transition. A documentary titled WAVE: A Boy's Record is set to trace his journey from child star to musician, offering a fuller picture of what the intervening decade has looked like for someone who appeared in the most-watched video in YouTube history before he was old enough to fully understand what that meant.

Whether WAVE can cut through in an increasingly competitive K-pop landscape remains to be seen. But the early signals — a high-profile feature from Joohoney, co-writing credits, a documentary in the works, and an audience already primed and waiting — suggest that Baby Shark Boy's next chapter may be rather more interesting than anyone expected.