Type O Negative have been certified gold for streams of I Don't Wanna Be Me, sixteen years after Peter Steele's death ended the band. Kenny Hickey gave the number to Ed Hackimer of This Day In Metal, in an interview transcribed by Blabbermouth, and he gave the reason too.
"We just got a gold single for streams. You know how many streams you need for that? 250 million," the guitarist said. "It went viral on TikTok, and it just blew the band up, and then just now all the rest of the music has been exposed to these kids. So that's what's happening. God bless TikTok. God bless TikTok."
Two hundred and fifty million plays is the threshold a gold single now means, and reaching it requires an audience that was not there when the record was. "My youngest, she's 24 now. I went to her college. She was surrounded by TYPE O fans," Hickey said. "Our original generation isn't dead yet, for the most part, and now we've just added another two generations on top of it."
He put a second number beside it, and this one is the more interesting of the two. "Look at what TikTok did to CROWBAR. A super-doom heavy band that has no commercial value at all now have 1.9 million listeners on Spotify." A band with no commercial value, by the assessment of someone in a position to make it, has a monthly audience the size of a mid sized city, and neither label nor radio put it there.
On a Steele tribute concert with the surviving members, Hickey said it is not logistically possible at the moment, that the offers exist, and never to say never. A full length concert recording is being prepared.