How Mother Mother Followed Up Their Viral Success
Credit: James O’Mara
Credit: James O'Mara
When artists achieve viral success on a release, they’re often under pressure to maintain momentum and to make their next release bigger and better. For Canadian four piece Mother Mother, their viral moment came in 2020 when songs from their 2008 album ‘O My Heart’ went viral on TikTok. One song in particular stood out - ‘Hayloft’. At the time of writing, official versions of the ‘Hayloft’ audio now accompany more than 635,000 videos on TikTok and unofficial versions of the song account for thousands more videos on the app.
‘Hayloft’ now sits just short of 263 million streams on Spotify. Two years ago, before their tracks went viral, Mother Mother had approximately 1.08 monthly Spotify listeners. Today, their monthly listeners sit at 7.33 million. That count peaked at 8.17 million in April of 2021. The band’s success on TikTok has been credited as a driving force behind this growth.
Thirteen years and five albums after the ‘O My Heart’ release, Mother Mother unveiled their album ‘Inside’ on June 25, 2021. Following the release, the band began teasing ‘Hayloft II’. The track was to be released as part of an extended version of ‘Inside’ and would give fans a chance to experience the lyrics and melody of ‘Hayloft’ in a new way.
In December 2021, Mother Mother shared a short documentary discussing the newfound success of the original ‘Hayloft’ track and the ‘ambitious and potentially foolish’ task of creating a sequel. On January 13, the band released a music video for the original ‘Hayloft’, providing a prequel to the ‘Hayloft II’ video, which they released on January 29. Jump forward a week, and ‘Hayloft II’ has now been used on more than 35,000 videos on TikTok. Over on Spotify, the track has clocked up 3.4 million streams in its first week and the ‘Hayloft’ music videos have a collective 2.5 million views on YouTube.
As we know, TikTok has a habit of breathing life back into new releases. Last year, Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ was one of the app’s biggest successes, re-entering the charts after topping them back in 1977. So this isn't the first time we’ve seen an older release pique the interest of TikTok users, and we doubt it will be the last. What we’re eager to see is how other artists capitalise on their TikTok success. Could the app’s nostalgia create a new trend where we see more artists revisiting and revitalising their old tunes?
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