For brynne, a Viral Single Is Thanks to Friendship and Luck

“why do i still see u?” was never supposed to be brynne’s first viral single. But through a supportive group of friends and hard work, he’s reached 100k streams.

A few weeks ago, brynne, an independent singer-songwriter and President of NEXT WORLD Collective assembled a small group of friends on the beach, a few miles outside of Los Angeles, to celebrate the one year anniversary of “why do i still see u?” (“wdissu”). 

“I wanted to film a proper music video for the song, which is still being finished right now,” he told me this week. “I filmed the video with two of my close friends, Logan and Eruma, and while we were filming it, we decided to [also] film a live acoustic video and take a couple photos of the merch.” 

This collaboration is, by design, how brynne works best, and emphasizes how integral his friends are to his success. His friends are the reason that brynne is able to make music or even merch. One of brynne’s best friends, singer-songwriter mica yui, designed a merch line for the single’s anniversary that includes a hoodie and t-shirt. 

On the beach, brynne tried to calm his nerves that this would be a boring shoot for everyone who had come to support him. “Before we had started filming, I remember that I was really anxious that the music video filming wasn’t going to go well and it would’ve been really boring for everyone,” he told me. “The first scene we shot took place in a car, and we have one of my friends spraying a water gun at me from the backseat.”

But as brynne’s friend crawled out of the backseat, he fell forward - “head first” - onto the driver’s seat and set off the car’s horn. The accident immediately broke the tension on set and took brynne out of his head. “The filming crew started laughing and we decided to keep that take, and that’s when I felt some of the anxiety go away, and I felt more excited for the rest of the shoot.”

Like a lot of the art brynne creates, “wdissu” came together surprisingly fast in just three days. The song began as a collaboration between brynne and his producer stvphn, a singer-songwriter also based in Los Angeles, who recorded the song’s guitar and drum loop. “I do remember that the original vocals without mixing were terrible, I had to re-record everything past the pre-chorus,” he recalled. “I also remember struggling with the harmony stack in the chorus, and luckily stvphn was able to help me with it.”

brynne’s relentless drive to create content like the one year anniversary push is one of the key reasons why “wdissu” has succeeded. At one point, brynne told me, he posted as many as three times per day on TikTok. “Although I wasn’t getting a lot of interactions from it,” he said, “I know that there was at least a little bit of exposure from it.”

The singer utilized Spotify’s Discovery Mode to push the song into more listeners’ algorithms. “Weirdly enough, because I was switching distributors around the time of releasing “why do i still see u?”, it actually got taken down for a few days during its peak, so I thought I wouldn’t be able to get any more streams on the song,” he said. 

Looking back on it now, brynne isn’t entirely sure why, out of all of his songs, “why do i still see u?” is his most popular. “I remember showing the song to a couple of my friends and they liked it, but they didn’t have a crazy reaction to it,” he explained. “I still have a similar view of the song today, but I am getting used to hearing the song over and over again since it got so popular.”

But this past month, the song broke 100,000 streams and pushed him towards 12,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. The single’s ascent comes as a surprise to brynne and to his small but mighty team of collaborators. The single’s success fulfills a goal that brynne set for himself at the beginning of the year: to break 20k monthly listeners (which he did earlier this year) and to have one song reach 100,000 streams. (To date, “wdissu” has over 113,000 plays.)

Yet when he considers all of the reasons “wdissu” blew up, one uncontrollable factor played the biggest role. “The final thing is just luck,” he said. “Beyond all the things that might ensure a song gets streams and all the work I could’ve put into promotions, luck is a much bigger factor than many people realize.”