Koo Koo’s social media and marketing strategy is pretty fluid. We’re just trying some stuff out.” Market by word of mouth and anticipation “I’m a 35-year-old white dad doing Tik Tok stuff, and I’m not Jack Black famous,” Bryan says. Their TikTok fans often are tweens and teens who fondly remember watching Koo Koo Kangaroo videos during breaks in their grade school classrooms. (And they now are a whisper away from 200K). This spring, as they prepared to launch their latest album, Slow Clap, on May 21, they started a TikTok channel, gaining nearly 180,000 followers in a month or so. The collaboration came about two years after the band released an album – without Panera’s consent – called Fast Casual about their love for the restaurant chain. In summer 2020, they partnered with Panera Bread for an at-home Camp Panera performance. On New Year’s Eve, they livestreamed a concert and countdown via the platform. They added shoutout videos, custom digital live shows, and livestream concerts on YouTube where they ask for donations or promote their online store. Though they joined YouTube in 2008, revenue didn’t reach $1,000 a month until about four years ago.īut with COVID shuttering concert venues, the duo looked online to keep their small business afloat. Until the pandemic, live shows, merchandise sales, and work with brands such as GUM Crayola and Intel were Koo Koo’s bread and butter. That ability to be flexible helped them in 2020.
“Being flexible and always trying to find out what the next frontier is for the band and not being held down by traditional ideas of what a band is or what a musical artist can or can’t do.” Flexibility brings pandemic survival “That’s a through-line for the story of our band,” Neil says. And while it wasn’t intended to be just for kids, teachers caught on, thanks, in part, to the band’s collaboration with GoNoodle, which provides digital content to schools.īefore Bryan and Neil knew it, Koo Koo was playing late-night gigs at bars and daytime birthday parties and family festivals. Audience members can watch the videos at home and practice, so they’re ready to dance with them when their live shows return. Their music features call-and-response lyrics and dance-along videos on YouTube, where they demonstrate the moves to each song. They wanted to create a live band that got audience members on their feet and involved. The two met in college four years earlier and, after playing in a rock band, started Koo Koo Kanga Roo to engage with audiences in a different way. Koo Koo Kanga Roo has been slow burning since 2008 when Bryan and co-creator Neil Olstad launched it. I’m so happy that nothing pops up huge and we are slow burning.”įans found in nightclubs and kids’ parties “At first, I used to think that, ‘Oh my gosh, we haven’t had this success in this way because that’s what you’re programmed to want and do,” says Bryan Atchison, half of Koo Koo Kanga Roo. They’ve still been able to connect with fans and find content that clicks. And with hit dance-along videos to high-energy songs such as Dinosaur Stomp or All I Eat Is Pizza, the Minnesota-based duo’s top 10 most popular uploads have between 2.9M and 26M views.īut, despite the numbers, the band has never gone viral, and while it would be a nice badge of honor, its creators are fine with that. Koo Koo Kanga Roo’s YouTube channel has racked up more than 139 million views. The three videos did better than the others. Don’t focus on quantity: They switched from doing a new video every two weeks to publishing three videos in a year.Find your own twist: Take the cool thing you like and make it yours.Be flexible: The duo evolved their idea, which now appeals to the nightclub crowd and grade-school kids.
Tilt: Interactive dance music that appeals to bargoers and grade-school kidsĬhannel: YouTube Subscribers: 200K Total Views: 139M Entrepreneurs: Bryan Atchison and Neil Olstad