Calgary’s Matt Masters has been putting out music for nearly two decades, but he’s experienced something new this week – one of his songs has gone viral.
The YouTube video for his latest song How Many Days Until Tomorrow garnered almost 45,000 views in just over a week.
“It’s the first release from my new upcoming album. I recorded it a little over a year ago and finished working on it last summer. I put the song out on Spotify and wanted to make sure it was on YouTube as well,” Masters explains, adding he crafted the video with a slideshow of images from a photo shoot with photographer Terrance Houle.
“I just quickly threw the photos into a slideshow, stuck the song on it and threw it up on YouTube without thinking much about it.”
That was on Thursday, April 25. By Saturday, April 27, the video had amassed 23,000 views, a fact Masters learned as he quickly checked his phone before a performance.
“I was like, ‘23,000 views? That can’t be right.’ But I was getting on stage, so I didn’t really think twice about it,” he says. “When I got off the stage an hour later, I looked again. And it said 28,000 views.”
Masters couldn’t believe his eyes.
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“I was like, ‘What’s happening?’ Because 5,000 views in two hours? That’s not in my normal experience,” he says, adding the video had climbed to 40,000 views within the first week.
That’s exciting enough for the Western singer-songwriter, but it’s where the video is being streamed from that is the most mind-boggling.
Masters noticed that a lot of views were spiking between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.
“The question then becomes, ‘Who’s listening to this thing at one in the morning? Why are there 3,000 people listening at one in the morning?”
Masters discovered his streams are coming from unexpected places around the world.
“Interestingly enough, the top place we’re getting engagement from is actually in Mexico, and the place that’s doing it at one in the morning is Poland.”
“The tune itself has a distinctly kind of mariachi vibe to it. When the horns kick in, the trumpets are inspired by the sounds of Mexico in a lot of ways,” Masters says, adding there’s also a fiddle section.
Masters believes the online algorithm picked up on the Mexican sound and that’s being reflected in the demographic of the audience. The video has also been picked up in Brazil, the U.S., Argentina, the United Kingdom, Germany and France.
The video is nearing 45,000 views a little more than a week after being posted. While that actually matches Masters’ biggest song on Spotify, that song took much longer to get there.
“That’s honestly taken 10 years to get there,” he says, adding it’s been exciting to watch the audience grow. “It’s really great. As an artist, when you make new music, you hope that people hear it.”
The new album, out later this year, is called Burgener (which is his legal last name) and features six songs including the lead single getting all of the attention.
“This is a bit different for me because the songs are more personal. I’ve historically written from more of a storyteller’s position, but in this album, I’m writing more from the heart, from personal experience. And I think that that emotion comes out in this particular song.”
The song is already in rotation at a couple of radio stations, including Kelowna’s CBC and Calgary’s CJSW, and it’s getting noticed on more mainstream stations, too.
Masters is performing on May 8 at The Blues Can and on May 10 at Congress Coffee.
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