The Start of Stardom: Vancouver Sleep Clinic

From submitting a local demo on the internet to travelling to international festivals and headlining their own shows around the country, these four boys from Brisbane are on their way to stardom.
Jamie Jeffery reports.

What were you doing at 18? Probably finishing school, looking forward to schoolies, the usual things. Well, four young boys from Brisbane (and when I say young, I mean that one of them is even younger than 18 and still in high school) have just recently splashed their name all over today’s music scene in a not-so-eighteen-year-old way.

Vancouver Sleep Clinic recently returned from the gigantic 500,000+ people strong festival South By South West (SXSW) in North America and have just finished on their own headline EP tour in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne a couple of weeks ago.

With over 800,000 views and countless likes and shares on one of their songs Collapse on SoundCloud, the band is absolutely astonished at the amount of support they have gotten in a short year or so of music.

The use of social media has helped the band a huge amount to get where they are today. When asked about this, Tim Bettinson, founder and lead singer of the Vancouver Sleep Clinic Project agreed, saying “social media is a massive part of getting your name out there in the music industry”.

“It is very important for the band and while all of that is true, I want people to visit our page focused on listening to our music, because after all, that is what we want people to do,” he said.

It is a growing trend for bands on social media to plague their pages with viral videos to gain more ‘likes’, but Tim has a different vision for their social media platforms.

“I know there are many acts out there who make sure their social media is perfect, and I’m all for that, but our focus is getting our music heard by those people who really love us.”

This vision for the band has evidently worked as they have been recently announced on the Electric Picnic festival in Ireland which hosts names such as Outkast, Lilly Allen and Beck, just to name a few.

The band have made that much of an impact on the music scene that even celebrities are listening to their music. Shay Mitchell from the show Pretty Little Liars tweeted that she has found a new band called Vancouver Sleep Clinic and that she has them on repeat.

Furthermore, huge DJ act Adventure Club also found the band and even asked to collaborate with them.

Although Vancouver Sleep Clinic have gained some success, the whole project did not start out as fast as Tim would have liked it.

“I started this project over a year ago and I would watch the numbers of our Facebook likes and listens on SoundCloud go up very slowly,” Tim said.

“Random companies would be inboxing us and asking about the health clinics in the Vancouver metropolitan area, which is hilarious, but rather frustrating at the same time.

“We would be spamming people that we knew from school every day and it helped our numbers, but as soon as Vapour started getting some serious attention, I knew I had to get a band together, from there the numbers skyrocketed and so did our success.”

YouTube also helped the band’s impact on the music scene with a music channel called Mr.SuicideSheep. When I personally found the band, their songs had less than 1000 views on SoundCloud. When I noticed Mr.SuicideSheep uploaded their song Vapour, the views on the video went to an astounding 120,000 in a matter of days.

“When the song was uploaded to Mr.SuicideSheep, we were constantly refreshing the page and watching the views on our song go up. It was absolutely mind-boggling at how quickly our song got noticed,” Tim said.

I went to one of their headline tour shows in Sydney. The band say they have kind of fluked it to be this far into their career in such a short amount of time, but from what I saw and heard, they are going so much further.

Their live show was impeccably beautiful, complete with the songs I know and love and what seems like everyone else loved as well, especially when Collapse made the whole room erupt in cheers. The band have just started out and they’re already jamming about like it’s their own living room.

It is safe to say you will be seeing these guys rocking out around the world even more than they are now, so get in on their amazing tunes now!