Austin & Colin: Telling the tales of communities with music, comedy and fun

Alumnus Austin Bever says ‘welcome’ to an Emmy Award for he and Colin’s viral social media city anthem.

In real life, Austin Bever (BS ’14), is a health and physical education (PE) teaching graduate of Lipscomb University, owner of a media company, husband to Mary Beth (Adams) Bever (LA ’10, BSN ’14) and father of two toddlers.

Pull up a social media app, however, and you may recognize him as the uproarious, mustachioed half of the comedy duo Austin & Colin, whose satirical pop-dance hits and social commentary on modern living have drawn more than 130 million views and more than 400,000 followers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

You may have seen him singing from a monster truck touring Broadway in Welcome to Nashville or perhaps dancing in the bathroom in Welcome to Buc-ee’s. He can be seen running with the cows through a field in Dickson County, bowling in Lawrenceburg and rapping in his car about popular faves Chick-Fil-A, Trader Joe’s and Costco (all with more than one million views).

Austin & Colin have busted a move with everyone from the Tennessee State University marching band to the Nashville Parks Police in various musical videos highlighting Nashville from Broadway to Hendersonville. Whether it’s the cicada invasion, sky-high humidity or the chaos that ensues whenever it snows, Austin and Colin always have something painfully accurate to say in a musical way about life in the South.

Now Bever, and his comedic partner Colin Cooper (a Belmont University grad), can add “Emmy winner” to their resumes. They made history this spring becoming the first winners of a regional Emmy Award in the inaugural social media category.

Awarded by the Southeast Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the honor recognized their city anthem-style video created for Mississippi State University and the City of Starkville, Mississippi. The duo’s city anthems are hilarious, localized songs and videos about towns, cities, colleges, neighborhoods and more.

“It was content that I don’t think anyone had ever seen before. That was a cool moment to go into a new frontier, especially to win against some very talented content makers,” said Bever of the Emmy win. “We don’t like doing something that has already been done before. We want to put our own spin on it, which is why these city tours are really resonating. People have not seen their own city in that light.”

 

Bever and Cooper write, perform, film and produce all of their social media content themselves. Drawing from influences such as “Weird Al” Yankovich, their social media videos and recorded music tracks always bring the fun.

It was digital media that brought the pair together in the first place, as Bever messaged his fellow Cincinnati-native Cooper on Facebook in 2009, when they were both still in high school. Having heard Cooper’s “beats” on the platform, Bever wanted to collaborate on a song glorifying minivans, as they both drove them to high school. After that first song, the pair ended up starting a band together, and they have remained a musical duo ever since, despite attending rival colleges in Nashville.

At Lipscomb, Bever said he was trying to figure out what he could give to the world that would also bring an income, “trying to find something that fueled my spirit and could be a calling,” he said.

He first landed on kinesiology as a major, because he likes sports and activity. Then “as someone always thinking of new ideas and always wanting to be on the go,” he shifted to physical education, thinking “You can ensure you can keep that inner child alive if you are teaching third-graders how to do yoga!”

But singing and musical theater had also always been a part of his life and personality. Bever and Cooper both played Gaston in their respective high schools’ productions of Beauty and the Beast, and Bever choreographed and performed in Singarama, Stompfest and the Tau Phi Cowboy Show at Lipscomb.

Cooper took a more direct path to his content creation career. He had been making videos since he received a Hi8 video camera as a young child. He was part of his first garage band by age 12 and has been a drummer for most of his life. His high school job was as a video editor for a manufacturing company.

“I was always one of the creative people in middle school and high school,” said Cooper, who started out his college career as a songwriting major. “I was the weird kid who was always making something different for class. It’s always been part of my life and I have never fallen out of love with it. The passion has only grown stronger.”

After graduation, Bever and Cooper decided to take a hard turn in their expected careers (Cooper graduated with a degree in information systems), and despite very little experience, they started a video company called Mac N’ Cheese Media. They also became roommates with two other Lipscomb alumni, Landry Smith (BA ’13, MFT ’24) and Josh Self (BA ’14, MDiv ’19), sleeping in bunk beds in a rented home a couple of blocks from the Lipscomb campus. They gave themselves three months to see if it could work.

The Bison community chipped in to help them get started. Dale Binkley (LA ’07, BA ’12) hired them to film his real estate tours. Evan Klisares (BBA ’13), provided capital so they could purchase equipment.

“We did a lot of Lipscomb weddings to start and get our feet wet,” said Bever. At one point early in their career, they created a video for Lipscomb’s kinesiology department, home of Bever’s health and PE teaching major. “It was just a normal video, but that was a pivotal point for us, since we were literally about to run out of money,” said Bever. “It was a God thing.”

Those days of highs and lows and overdrawn bank accounts taught the now wildly successful friends to never take their success for granted, said Bever, and he still counts his close circle of friends at Lipscomb among his best friends and supporters today.

They slowly worked their way into the country music field and then commercial work for companies like Icee, Harlem Globetrotters and The Escape Game. All the while, they “were always trying to find a way to build out our brand,” said Cooper. As far as social media, “for a few years we were posting high-quality content, but it wasn’t getting much reach,” said Bever.

One idea they had was a call-back to a successful audio post they made in Cincinnati back in 2009, when the pair created “a song about all the things we loved about Cincinnati that parodied Katy Perry’s California Gurls,” said Cooper. The song Cincinnati Girls, got 100,000 views in just a few days on Youtube.

“It was shocking and it launched our career in Cincinnati for a couple of years,” he said. “We got on the news and the radio.”

Over the years while running Mac N’ Cheese Media, the pair developed and posted various styles of social media content, but the city anthem style, featuring city sites and a fun, hyper-accurate song, was the format that had always resonated the most with audiences, said Cooper.

In 2016, they decided to use that format to go big. In a bid to increase their social media presence and its impact on their careers, they wrote a funny musical tour of Nashville’s metropolitan area. They spent two weeks filming the four-minute video featuring themselves dancing and rapping through a bevy of Nashville locations (Lipscomb’s Allen Bell Tower can be glimpsed in the verse on Nashville‘s colleges).

The idea was to present “all the things we think about as we pass these areas, but nobody really says it,” says Bever. Bacherlorettes, Broadway’s unique street tours, hot chicken, murals and rooftop pools all make an appearance in the video as well as specific neighborhoods, stores and restaurants, the Nissan Stadium and the Green Hills Mall, among many others.

“We weren't sure if Nashville would appreciate the video or completely shun it,” said Bever.

They posted Welcome to Nashville, and the next morning, “I woke up to nine calls from the news,” said Bever. “It was the first real moment of true virality that sent us off to the world of viral content creation.” That original video now has more than 5 million views.

They proceeded to make city anthem videos for Nashville neighborhoods like Bellevue, Mt. Juliet, Hendersonville and Franklin (sponsored by Lipscomb alum and realtor Davey Hackett (BA ’13)). They created one for the city’s greenway system, for the Broadway tourist district and about driving in Nashville. “We found something that in today’s social media landscape is going viral every time,” said Bever.

The pair signed a record deal with BMG/BBR Music Group, and in 2025, Austin & Colin received a call that touched off a new phase of their social media journey.

The Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce (run by Lipscomb alum Ryan Egly (MA ’21))  wanted to work with them to create their own city anthem video and song for the Middle Tennessee town of Lawrenceburg. The music video about a town of around 12,000 people, about 80 miles from Nashville, received more than two million views.

“That just showcases the power of social media and marketing. That reach is unheard of,” said Bever.

The duo handed off Mac N’ Cheese Media to their longtime friend and co-founder in the company, Sean Webster, and began working as Austin & Colin full-time, frequently partnering with various communities such as Dickson, Marshall County and Columbia in Tennessee and Buena Park and Tri-Valley in California, with more in the works for the future. In 2026, they created music videos about Mexico, Canada, and Greenland from their homes in Nashville which attracted over 15+ million views combined.

The Emmy-winning Starkville, Mississippi, video was their first on-site college collaboration. Featuring student nicknames for campus buildings, cowbell ringing fans, local hangouts, a weiner dog race and a nod to football rivalries, among many other references, the video shows off the campus from a student’s point of view. It quickly garnered more than two million views.

“Every city in America has a story to tell, and we get to see from the people what they see as special about their community. We’re so grateful we get to share it and take that journey with people,” said Bever.

Starting with a questionnaire about what makes each community special (i.e. iconic landmarks, history and locals’ hometown pride, complaints, quirks and inside jokes) and a whiteboard full of potential concepts to include in each song, the city anthem creation process is tedious, like a giant puzzle, says Bever, “with lots of rhyming and replacing… we try to find a storyline that is cohesive and funny, but also represents the true culture of what we are trying to show.”

The whole process takes four to five days for a shorter project or up to three weeks for a large  city, said Cooper. Ironically, these days the team opts to film with just an iPhone, setting aside the years of professional videographer experience they have. For a job with sometimes 60 locations to shoot in a day, less equipment makes them faster and more nimble, Bever said.

While their business is comedy, the duo take their social media enterprise very seriously. They analyze the attention each video gets, noting how many followers and non-followers (a potential new audience) view each video. They believe in posting quality over quantity and avoiding spamming their followers with too much sub-par content, said Cooper.

It takes a great deal of research and eye for human nature to succeed in the social media landscape, said Bever.

“Don’t just focus on just putting something out there, focus on creating quality content the audience can relate to on some sort of emotional level,” he said. “Today we see so much negativity and shock value content… It is a little harder to leverage humor and positivity that makes people feel nostalgic and proud of where they come from. We are trying to break that cycle of negative content, to say, ‘This is fun!’ We are happy we’re able to spread that word.

“I am so grateful to have the opportunity to make a career in the creative industry,” he continued. “I can tell you for certain that the only reason we are still doing this is because God has opened every door, right when it needed to be opened.

“There have been many difficult times and I am incredibly grateful for my wife who has supported me and everyone who has been a part of cheering us on along the way.”