When Your Song Has a Wikipedia Page, But Your Band Doesn't
How did a song that’s only 87 seconds long get over 1 billion streams on Spotify?
The short answer: TikTok.
But I think the long answer is more interesting.
I kept hearing this song called “Evergreen” by Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners (RMCM) on IG slideshows and TikTok Reels so I looked it up and it raised a few questions:
It’s only 87 seconds long and has over 1 billion streams on Spotify?
It came out in 2017 and I’m only just now hearing about it?
The song has a Wikipedia page, but the band doesn’t?
Who was the first person to make this 8 year old song go viral?
Is TikTok the best tool for the Exposure Effect in history?
The Exposure Effect is a psychological phenomenon where people develop a preference for things simply because they’re familiar with them. That thing could be a song, a painting, a meal, even something as simple as a shape.
In Hit Makers by Derek Thompson, he writes “The evolutionary explanation of the exposure effect is simple: If you recognize an animal or a plant, then it hasn’t killed you yet.” So, you like it.
TikTok is designed to maximize the exposure effect. It gets you familiar with a bunch of different videos and sounds (and brands cough DuoLingo *Cough) in an incredibly short period of time. Most likely, you asserted zero control over what content you were going to see since people rarely “search” on TikTok and most posts you see are from accounts that you don’t even follow.
Using music as our example, the study “Discovery Dynamics: Leveraging Repeated Exposure for User and Music Characterization” found that when users are exposed to a new song, their liking increases initially, peaks after 5 to 8 exposures, and then declines with over-saturation at which point, TikTok stops exposing you to it.
TikTok became such a player in the music industry, labels were like “hey, i feel like you’re making money off our artists that we should be making off our artists so we need your money.” So they went to court. Then another study, “The Impact of Social Media on Music Demand: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment” analyzed data from that UMG vs. TikTok case. They found that when TikTok was forced to remove music from its platform, the songs that suffered the most were either new songs or songs from unknown artists.
A third study (because I have so much free time apparently, like why am I going down this rabbit hole?) called “I’ve Heard This Before: Initial Results on TikTok’s Impact on the Re-Popularization of Songs,” found that many songs see a notable increase in search interest and streams after being featured in TikTok videos. Particularly when paired with emotional, memeable, or thematic content. It also found that TikTok activity precedes spikes in web search interest for older tracks or obscure tracks. It causes the virality, it doesn’t reflect it.
According to TikTok and Luminate, in 2024, 84% of songs debuting on the Billboard Global 200 first went viral on TikTok.
Evergreen by RMCM came out in 2017, but didn’t crack the Billboard 100 til it debuted at #15 in January 2024. The first inkling of virality on TikTok was December 2022. @Michelle_5544 used the sound to accompany a video of two guys rediscovering a lost species (ICYMI, the black-naped pheasant pigeon was spotted for the first time in 140 years. Huge win for pheasants everywhere.). The video has 15.7 million views.
Then @Waxyegg started a new trend called #hopecore in January of 2023 and eventually, “Evergreen” was adopted as the soundtrack for it. #emotional #thematic. Since then, “Evergreen” turned into evergreen content as it was used in thousands of TikTok reels that gained hundreds of millions of views.
While an 87 second long would never go viral in the radio era, its short length was actually a strength on TikTok (and IG once they introduced music to photo carousels in August of 2023).
Richy Mitch and The Coal Miners were still working regular jobs when the short intro track on their first album started to pop off.
Now, they’re on their second cross-country tour.
“I had done this 300-mile backpack through Colorado when I was 16-years-old, and that’s when I wrote most of the first album,” (Richy) Mitch recalled to Steven Graham at Audacy. “At that point, the song was about hiking. You’re battling against yourself to keep walking and stepping.”
After walking and stepping for nearly a decade, they finally got their exposure.