Vacations are an Australian band from Newcastle who started gaining traction in the summer of 2020 (during the thick of the pandemic) when their song ‘Young’ was being used on TikTok as a backdrop to a montage of scenes from the show Skins.
We quickly signed the band seeing the potential from UGC videos and leaned into successes on TikTok via several influencer campaigns (successfully creating broader POV uses), optimising experiences on TikTok (by correctly tagging the band on sounds, getting playlisting on the platform, getting banners on the music page) and creating more ways for fans to be a part of the band’s growing base (through a fansourced music video for ‘Young’ and a Lost Stems contest to recreate the stems of the song, which indeed had been lost).
We were fast to hire agencies in local “trigger” markets where we were seeing viral/Shazam charting (D Music in Latin America and LPA in Mexico), furthering the momentum via press, radio and third party playlisting.
Throughout all of this, the song has remained a TikTok-driven story with new trends (a knocking one – which featured some of the top influencers from Bella Poarch to Rosalia, a slowed down original upload and a new one centred around the use of the Peppery Filter).
The band has felt extremely isolated with the Australia lockdowns and not being able to tour and connect face-toface with these new fans; in order to combat this, we recently teamed up with Spotify for a Fans First pre-sale around their newly announced Fall 2022 US tour.
The song ‘Young’ has seen roughly 600k uses on TikTok (a 600% increase from when we signed them in July 2020), 680k Shazam tags (a 611% increase from last year with consistent growth rate following the “knock” trend) and has been streamed a total of 155m+ times (the song just reached a record peak of 3m streams a week, an increase of 4,880% from this time last year).
The track has appeared on 15 Spotify Viral 50 Charts (peaking at #29 in the US) and 319 Shazam charts (peaking at #48 in Peru, #64 in Mexico, & #72 in Chile).
The band now have 176k Spotify followers (250% increase from a year ago), went from having a little less than 1m monthly listeners on Spotify a year ago to 3.3m+ currently, and the band now has 32k TikTok followers (6,557% increase from last year – with the biggest spike occurring after the knocking trend with a 213% bump).
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