How Avicii's Booed Ultra Set Became a Global Hit

Transcript

If I told you there was a time when people actually hated Avicii, would you believe me? No one talks about this anymore. But when he performed "Wake Me Up," people were booing. It's Ultra 2013 at the main stage.

While Tim was at the peak of his career, most artists would think to just double down on what works. Avicii did something completely different. He changed the formula on his hit songs, going from uplifting melodies to country. The result: they booed him and wrote mean tweets about him. But just a couple months later, that same song that got booed went on to become a global hit. And it was all because of one person. So how did it happen?

After all of this happened, Avicii went online and said this: the safe bet for him would definitely have been to keep milking that old recipe. He knew how to do it, and it came easily to him. But he knew there was a huge risk involved in such a rapid change to his music. He loved every song on his new album, True, and a couple of those songs happened to be influenced by country. Those songs were "Wake Me Up" and "Hey Brother." Tim said the album True represented much of what he was listening to at the time: Fleet Foxes, Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters and Men, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

But before these two so-called country-infused EDM songs became hits, they were a disaster. Ultra Music Festival 2013, main stage. In that one hour Avicii was up there, people in the crowd would argue this was the worst moment ever for Avicii. With less than 30 minutes of his time slot remaining, Avicii and his team took the biggest risk of their lives. The lights completely turned off, they stopped the music, and a live band was brought onstage to perform songs from his debut album, True. They used instruments like banjos. Talk about a risk.

The thing was, people had never heard this song before. They didn't even know it was coming. It sounded so different from Avicii's uplifting sound that they actually thought it was a completely different person up there filling in for him. They thought turning off the lights meant he was done. That's actually part of why people were booing: some didn't even know Avicii was up there. They wanted to hear Avicii, not what they thought was a replacement band. Also, there were thousands of people who came looking for "Levels" and "Bromance," which is usually what Avicii plays at the end of his sets. Instead, they got country. That left fans confused. If you watch the live set, you can see people leaving. It just wasn't the best to dance to, especially coming right after the first 30 minutes of a set that was all progressive and uplifting melodies. It's also hard to transition into a song you've never heard before. Most people don't even like a song until they've heard it on TikTok 52 times.

But another reason it went so badly is that it sounded a bit off. The set didn't have the normal production behind it, so it just sounded like a regular live band. If you rewatch it, you can see the timing was a bit off too. During rehearsal, Tim can be heard saying to the sound guy, "Don't start playing the music until the band starts playing." He was supposed to join in with the drop to accompany the live band, but the drop for the song never came in, only the live band was playing. Also, the ticking in Avicii's earpiece was a metronome to keep him on beat with the instrumental BPM, but from what I understand, he was confused about whether the band would come in before or after he started singing. Since there was no music, there was just that tick, tick through his ears. That's why it sounded a little awkward.

You can also imagine what Dan Tyminski was thinking, since he was up next and the audience was nearly booing Avicii offstage during "Wake Me Up." He was definitely nervous going out there, since it was his first time doing something like this.

But people just weren't ready yet. Even Avicii said as much. After this happened, it was not good. Avicii's worst fears happened: his music getting booed by the audience, and technical issues on top of it. This traumatized him and made his anxiety worse. I honestly think he believed his music career was over afterward.

Tiësto said this: "I think Tim definitely got his heart broken by what he thought was brilliant. And it was brilliant. 'Wake Me Up' is the best song in the world right now. At the moment you put your heart and soul into your album, you play it for the first time live, and the whole crowd is booing it away."

Shortly after his Ultra performance, Avicii addressed his fans online. "Wow, looks like I stirred up some controversy with my set Friday night at UMF. Seeing a lot of people who don't understand." Avicii explained that his album was about experimentation, about showing the endless possibilities of house and electronic music. He clarified it was certainly not country, and that he wanted to make a statement, and there's no better place to make one than the main stage. "People will soon see what it's all about," Avicii wrote. "My music is open to anyone who wants to listen, and I will always stay true to my sound. Love you all who listen with open hearts and open minds."

And he was right. Avicii went from being booed at Ultra and ridiculed online to becoming one of the most loved artists in the world. "Wake Me Up" became the highest charting dance track of the decade. But how? One person made the difference: his manager, Ash. Despite all the backlash, they knew one thing: negative attention is still attention. So they came up with a plan. They gathered all the hate tweets and critical comments and turned them into a bold trailer with one tagline: "See what the fuss is all about." The trailer linked directly to the SoundCloud upload of Avicii's Ultra 2013 set, and from there, it exploded. Day by day, the comments turned from negative to positive. People gave it another listen, and they loved it. Once the hype reached its boiling point, they officially dropped the single. It hit number five on the Billboard 200, topped the electronic albums chart for eight straight weeks, won a VMA, and now has over two billion streams. And the American Music Award goes to Avicii.