Christian Gates’ 2020 remix of Royal & the Serpent’s “Overwhelmed” got so big on TikTok, hundreds of thousands of fan videos, that Atlantic Records reached out to make it official. The full version, released with Royal & the Serpent, outstreamed the original for a stretch and has now crossed 100 million streams. Some artists get discovered; he got summoned.
A remix that took over the feed
Gates’ version of “Overwhelmed” did not just do numbers; it became a format. Hundreds of thousands of fan videos were made to his remix, the kind of organic, wall-to-wall saturation that money cannot reliably buy. It was proof of a specific talent Gates had been sharpening since his earliest TikToks: the ability to take a song and make a version the internet wants to use.
The label came to him
The reach was impossible to ignore. Atlantic reached out alongside Royal & the Serpent and her manager, and together they turned the viral remix into an official, full release. For a stretch, the collaboration outperformed the original, pulling more daily streams than the song it was born from. The official version has now passed 100 million streams.
He remixed someone else’s song so well the label made it official.
Not his only viral sound
“Overwhelmed” was the one that turned into a real release, but it was not the only time Gates minted a viral sound. Earlier, a remix of the “What’s New Scooby-Doo” theme racked up hundreds of thousands of fan videos, though he never put it out on Spotify. The pattern was clear: give Gates a melody and an audience, and he could manufacture a moment.
The blueprint for what came next
The instincts behind “Overwhelmed” are the same ones that later produced the Gold-certified NUMB and eventually his own marketing venture, Swarm. It all comes from understanding, earlier than most, that a sound is only as big as the number of people who want to make videos with it. More in the wiki.