So your song has gone viral on TikTok

0:00What is it like to be hustling in a DIY band when, out of the blue, a song you wrote more than half a decade ago, suddenly goes viral viral on TikTok.

0:21And we're talking crazy viral, like 83 ,000 TikTok videos and 600 million streams on Spotify viral. Well, that's exactly what happened to Massachusetts indie weirdos Vundabar with their 2015 track Alien Blues. Hello, hello world. You liked me a little better. They were Wi-Fi. Cause I need the coach. Wi-Fi. Chip, chip, chip. I'm in the hall of water. Just a bottle. Somebody love. So this week, we're joined by Brandon Hagen, the frontman and guitarist for Vundabar, to talk about the surreal experience of navigating unexpected success as an independent musician in an algorithmically driven industry that demands increasingly more from artists while giving them less.

1:05We get into the brutal economics and strange social workings of what it means to be a working musician today, how the financial traumas of the 2008 recession, the pandemic, and, well, today, have informed a generation of independent artists, and why sticking to a DIY ethos might be the only viable option for survival in today's music industry. Be sure to catch Vinda Bar on tour right now in North America. They put on a killer live show. Don't miss it.

1:35Know how Money Talks Honey Money

1:54Doesn't Talk Money Scrape

2:07Hey guys, we are back with Brandon from Vindovar. How's it going? Hey, good. How y 'all doing? We're good. So for folks who might not be acquainted with you in the band, can you tell us a little bit about your guys' vibe, what you guys do, how long you've been at it as an independent rock crew? Sure. I would say we're a rock and roll band from Massachusetts. we've been going for like 11 or 12 years we sort of came about in a different era of like DIY touring and sort of climbed through that into I guess some more commercial spaces and um are now reckoning with the brave new world that is music in 2024.

2:52Can you tell us like where in Massachusetts like what scene you kind of came out of? I'd say we're a band from Boston because that's sort of where we got our feet and started and really when the band was forming where we were based. There was like a just a big wave of a DIY circuit there and a couple small clubs and then just loads of kids and you know this sort of transient refilling well of young people that wanted to get into music. At the time it really was just like a great proving ground I would say or incubator. We've since lost some of those smaller clubs, particularly Great Scott, but apparently they're reopening.

3:32They found a new spot in their opening sometime this year or next year, so that's big. Yeah, I was going to ask what kind of venues or record stores were in the mix. There was one called The Womb that I think that was our go-to. The Middle East Upstairs, The Lilypad, Great Scott, O 'Brien's. What were some of the other DIY places? Gay Gardens also went in Jamaica Plain I'm blanking there were tons though and I think that that's the thing is that wave of garage music was the messaging of like you can do this like you can record your own record book your own tour was very forward yeah it was just exciting and I think um kind of set us off yeah and it worked yeah yeah totally so a couple years ago Vinda Bar had something kind of crazy happen which is this song called alien blues which is from your 2015 album gawk that was your second album it went crazy viral like seemingly out of nowhere more than half a decade after it was released like millions upon millions of streams i was checking it out on spotify last night i think it has currently like almost 600 million streams which is insane um congrats what i did not know that was like possible to have that many streams what was that like as this DIY band that had been hustling for some years like at what point did you realize that what was happening was kind of bigger than like this old track you know picking up a little bump in streams um I realized it once I mean I saw the metrics and I was like okay something's going on but I really knew something was happening because all the major labels track metadata so they all sort of descended on me on the exact same day.

5:20Oh, wow. About how long after was that? Like one or two days. Wow. I guess that's a certain threshold. Like it had sort of been bubbling up for a couple of months. And then, yeah, that was the indicator to me. I was like, what could these people possibly want with us? How many streams did it have at that point? I don't know. At its peak, it was streaming a million a day. I don't know the number, but that was like what it was doing daily when it whatever hit some marker with metadata for the majors. That's wild. Yeah, it's crazy. It's a very like disorienting couple months, but I feel like we were able to get through it relatively unscathed and sort of stick to our values.

6:06And yeah. Yeah, how have things changed for you and the band since that happened? And like what hasn't changed? I mean, I think that's it for the free preview version of this episode. To hear the rest of our conversation with Brandon and get access to more bonus episodes like this one, as well as our Discord community and other goodies, go sign up for a paid subscription on our sub stack. For the next week, that's through November 8th, we're offering a 50 % discount on paid subscriptions. So that's just$25 a year. You can get all the goods over at theculturejournalist.substack.com.