Songfacts®:

• Rihanna's first single was "Pon De Replay" in 2005, where she tells the DJ to turn the music up. In "Don't Stop The Music," she makes a similar request, asking the DJ to keep the music going so can unwind.
  
  Most of Rihanna's songs aren't set in clubs - she covers a lot of musical and lyrical ground in her discography - but she could do dance music as well as anyone. These would have to be all-ages clubs: Rihanna was just 19 when "Don't Stop The Music" was released on her Good Girl Gone Bad album.
• The songwriter Tawanna Dabney wrote the lyric, and the beat came courtesy of the Norwegian production duo StarGate (Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen). StarGate previously helmed the #1 hits "So Sick" by Ne-Yo and "Irreplaceable" by Beyonce. When they first heard Rihanna's "Pon De Replay," they were determined to work with the singer.
• A little over a minute into the song, the famous "mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-koo-sa" chant from Michael Jackson's 1982 track "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" sneaks in. Jackson got the line from the Cameroon saxophonist Manu Dibango's 1972 song "Soul Makossa (Funky Soul Makossa)" without permission and was forced to compensate Dibango in an out-of-court settlement over its use. Twenty-six years later, Dibango launched another compensation claim against Rihanna, as the Barbadian singer's use of the line came with permission from Jackson, but not him. It's Michael Jackson who is credited as a songwriter on "Don't Stop The Music."
• "Don't Stop The Music" was a huge international hit, going to #1 in France, Germany and Australia. It won for International Song Of The Year at the 2008 French NRJ Music Awards.
• This was the fourth single from Rihanna's third album, Good Girl Gone Bad. The lead single was the rainmaker "Umbrella," which stayed at #1 for seven weeks in the US. It was followed by "Shut Up And Drive" and her Ne-Yo duet "Hate That I Love You." After "Don't Stop The Music," "Take A Bow" was released, giving Rihanna her third US #1, following "SOS" and "Umbrella." She was just 19 when the album was issued.
• The music video uses a shorter version of the song. It opens with a scene of Rihanna getting out of a cab and going to a dance club through a secret entrance, where she gets her dance on. Anthony Mandler, who also helmed her videos for "Hate That I Love You" and "Shut Up And Drive," was the director.
• In Australia, this was the first single to top the chart solely on download sales.
• Tor Erik Hermansen credits "Don't Stop The Music" as one of the first songs to introduce dance music to the American mainstream. He told Entertainment Weekly: "It was a seminal record in the sense that, prior to that song and Justin Timberlake's 'SexyBack,' dance music was basically non-existent in American pop. People would always say, 'That four-to-the-floor kick-drum pattern doesn't work in America, it's not going to work on radio.' And up until that point, they would've been right. But for this particular song, which started with the 'mama-say mama-sah' sample that Michael Jackson used on 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin',' it was the right thing to do. That was our first time making a dance beat, but we tried to keep the melody soulful and the bassline funky and not too cold and techno-y."