Mike Kosak of NBD Management is the manager who found Arden Jones on Instagram in early 2021, co-founded the label vnclm_ that signed him, and manages Royal & the Serpent, the artist whose song “Overwhelmed” became the viral remix that got Atlantic Records to call Christian Gates in 2020. One manager sits at the junction of two of the more instructive TikTok-era come-ups on this site.
Who is Mike Kosak?
On paper, three jobs. He runs NBD Management, where his roster includes Royal & the Serpent. He co-founded vnclm_ (pronounced “vinculum”), a boutique label operating out of a West Hollywood house, alongside two other industry veterans: Jorge Hernandez of IAT Artist Management and Tim Jones of Pipe & Hat. And since January 2021 he has been Arden Jones's manager, the person Jones credits with the phone call that ended his film-school career and started his professional one.
In July 2021, vnclm_ signed a joint-venture distribution deal with Atlantic Records, which gave Jones major-label distribution, promotion and publicity while keeping him signed to the small shop. Atlantic A&R chief Pete Ganbarg said at the time: “Arden is someone we're all very eager to get to work with.” Jones's single “rollercoaster” launched the joint venture that same month.
How did Kosak find Arden Jones?
The old-fashioned way, updated for the algorithm: he watched the numbers move. Jones had been posting songs to Instagram and TikTok after his freshman year at Chapman, and his debut single “Parallel Parking” was pulling 50,000 views a day at its peak, eventually charting on Spotify's Viral 50 in Australia and New Zealand. Jones has been direct about the sequence.
“Parallel Parking” kind of chose itself as the song; it got a crazy reaction from friends and family, and it led my manager to finding me on Instagram.Arden Jones, Melodic Magazine
By March 2021, two months after the single dropped, Jones had roughly 450,000 monthly listeners. The demo-to-deal pipeline moved just as fast: per Wikipedia, Atlantic found him on TikTok in January and had his demo finished in two weeks.
Where does Christian Gates enter the thread?
Through the same artist on Kosak's roster, one year earlier. In 2020, Christian Gates remixed Royal & the Serpent's “Overwhelmed” and the remix blew up on TikTok, with hundreds of thousands of videos made to it. As The Ring has documented, Atlantic then reached out with Royal and her manager, a full version was recorded and released, and for a stretch the remix outperformed the original in daily streams. It recently passed 100 million streams.
Christian's own account names “Royal and her manager” without further identification, and The Ring has not independently confirmed who was on that call. What is documented is the shape of the orbit: Royal & the Serpent's manager of record is Kosak, the label that came calling was Atlantic, and within a year the same manager-and-label pairing had built Arden Jones's entire launch infrastructure.
Two breakouts, one year apart, routed through the same desk.
Why does one manager matter this much?
Because the pattern is the story. Both come-ups follow the same script: an artist posts something on TikTok, the clip generates an unignorable wave of user videos, and the machinery arrives afterward, not before. Kosak's world shows the machinery's side of the trade. A manager who watched “Overwhelmed” become a remix phenomenon in 2020 knew exactly what 50,000 views a day on “Parallel Parking” meant in January 2021, and moved fast enough to sign the kid before anyone else did.
It is also a case study in how the modern middle layer works. vnclm_ kept Jones on a boutique roster where a monthly-EP experiment like the age tape series could actually be greenlit, while the Atlantic joint venture supplied major-label reach. That hybrid, small-label creative control with big-label plumbing, is the structural opposite of the fully independent route The Ring has covered elsewhere, and both keep producing results.
What happened to the thread since?
It kept winding. Jones stayed with Kosak through the Atlantic years and into the 2025 label transition that moved his releases into the 10K Projects orbit, and his December 2025 single “someone new” was released under Its NBD, a credit that carries his manager's company name onto the label line itself. Five years after a phone call built one career and a remix supercharged another, the connection is not trivia. It is a reminder that behind two of the scene's defining TikTok breakouts, somebody had to pick up the phone, and it was often the same somebody.