It came as a shock to members of the local Moose Jaw group, but the Scott Benson Band recently went gold-certified overseas after a viral TikTok video put the spotlight on one of their singles.
“It's baffling that we had no idea [this was happening] and a few months ago was unbelievable,” said guitarist Andrew Fath. “But I’m excited to see where things go from here and what the band can achieve next.”
The adventure began when the band’s 2014 track “Requiem For A Dream,” a cover of the famous instrumental composed by Clint Mansell, was used by UFC Europe in a promotional TikTok back in January.
Over 10,500 more TikTok videos then picked up the song and used it, resulting in an avalanche of views that led to a spike in people listening to the single online using various streaming services.
“It’s hard to get specifics but I think we’re at about half a billion views [on TikTok] overall, which is pretty insane,” said drummer Jared Dormer. “And that inspired people looking it up on Shazam or Spotify, and a few U.K. and Russian-specific sites [and] that’s what really drove the streaming numbers.”
The instant surge in traffic meant that the track first went double-silver and then gold record certified in Europe, as it blew through the set threshold of 75,000 sales or 11.25 million individual streams needed for the award.
The Scott Benson band is a Moose Jaw-based instrumental group made up of Dormer, Fath, Cameron Church on bass, Scott Benson on violin and fiddle and Jared Robinson as both keyboardist and producer.
The group had recently been focusing on other projects, and so Dormer and Fath said this news was at once both shocking and incredibly exciting.
“This kind of came out of nowhere and we were just blown away,” said Dormer. “It’s crazy, and to think, it’s all from an app that wasn’t even created [when the song was recorded].”
“I remember getting the message from Scott and Jared, and feeling an overwhelming sense of joy,” added Fath. “I couldn’t remove the smile from my face and at that point, we were just gaining popularity in Europe, we hadn’t even reached gold status.”
Although the gold record plaques haven’t yet arrived in the mail, band members do already have the double silver record plaques issued for “Requiem For A Dream.” / (supplied)“It’s pretty exciting because we’re still gaining streams, still climbing in charts,” said Fath. “I love making music, I love working with the guys in the band, and it's all just a little bit surreal.”
The sudden burst of interest has left the band invigorated and talking about new material, said Dormer and Fath — and maybe not-so-jokingly considering an overseas tour in the future.
“We met as a band in February and made some plans to tackle some new material this summer, so we have some tracks and ideas we’re going to be working on in the coming months,” said Fath.
Dormer said that the experience has also made the band think differently about new music, and about how their tracks might cater to a viral video audience.
“It has shifted our focus a little bit, [and] now our minds are thinking, you know, what songs can we put out that will be attractive to that TikTok audience, because as an instrumental band, language isn’t a barrier for us,” said Dormer. “Technology has really allowed for bands to grow [and] the fact we can use something like this to grow our fanbase is pretty incredible.”
