It's an hour before showtime, and Kurt Schneider can't remember his own song. It's blaring from the speakers mounted nearby—"Shadow," a ballad he wrote and produced with his friend Sam Tsui a few years ago—but he hasn't played the song in a while, and can't remember the piano part. (When you've arranged, recorded, produced, written, directed, edited, and mixed more than 300 songs and videos, you tend to forget a few things.) Schneider hunches over his Yamaha keyboard, boxers sticking out the back of his jeans; after a minute of banging around, the muscle memory kicks in, and the part comes back. Then, just as suddenly, it's time to go. He slips on his shoes, runs his hands through his messy hair, and jumps in his car to head to tonight's shoot.
Over the next several hours, Schneider will direct, produce, and perform in a music video for a cover of the song "Roses" by the Chainsmokers. Schneider arranged, mixed, and recorded the audio on this one—but he's not the star of this video. That would be Tsui, his closest collaborator, who recorded the vocals yesterday in Schneider's home studio. Schneider's rarely the star of his videos, but he's without question the star of his channel. And like many of the platform's stars, YouTube has made him famous. Like, 7 million subscribers and more than a billion views famous.
One of Schneider's biggest fans is actually in town: Kayla, the 16-year-old whose only wish for Christmas vacation was to fly to LA to meet Schneider and Tsui. They both know who she is, because she's one of the super-duperfans who comments on and shares absolutely everything they do. Her mom reached out to Schneider months earlier, and Schneider and Tsui decided to surprise her. So they told Kayla no, sorry, too busy, but offered to have a friend give her a tour of "a studio they shoot in sometimes" that's owned by Alex Goot, another well-known YouTuber. As she enters an abandoned-looking building in an industrial neighborhood of downtown LA, Kayla has no idea what's waiting for her upstairs.
Tsui is behind the piano; Schneider sits on a wooden stool with a guitar on his lap. (He re-learned the piano part for nothing, apparently.) They've set up another stool just inside the door for Kayla to sit on. When Kayla opens the door, the guys start to play. As Tsui sings the first lines of “Shadow”—Kayla's favorite song—Kayla practically melts onto the stool. Her whole body is shaking. When I ask her a few minutes later how she felt, she can barely answer. "This is the best day of my life you're witnessing right now," she says, without ever taking her eyes off Schneider.
After a few minutes of serenading, selfies, and chatter, Schneider shoos the rest of us into a corner of the large square room. He drags the piano across the floor toward a better-lit corner, and stands Tsui in front of a microphone in the exact center of the room. It's time to shoot tonight's video, for the millions of other fans who don't get to watch live. A couple of weeks from now, Schneider will publish it on his YouTube channel, where his 7 million followers will devour their new take on "Roses." The comments will say the same things they always do, the same things you'd see on a Bieber video or shouted at the One Directioners. "Wow, this version is much better then the original." "This gives me the chills omg, so amazing." "this is a million times better than that radio trash."
In case you hadn't noticed, YouTube has taken over the music industry. A much-cited Nielsen study in 2012 found that more teens listen to music on YouTube than any other platform. A similar study in 2015 showed that YouTube accounts for fully half of all music streaming. Radio's not dead, and neither is iTunes. But they're not the future; YouTube is. And Kurt Hugo Schneider—he goes by all three names professionally, or KHS for short—may just be the most powerful YouTuber musician on the planet. He's among the most prominent of this new kind of artist: native to the Internet, skilled in everything from video production to sultry falsetto to distribution strategy. Together, these artists are charting a new path to fame and fortune that begins, and increasingly ends, on YouTube.
There are plenty of YouTube success stories. But Schneider is different. He can sing and dance, sure, but he takes most pleasure in being the guy behind the piano (and camera, and mixing board, and editing suite). He's a producer in an era where everyone wants to be the frontman. He's become the hub of a teeming group of YouTuber musicians; in fact, he's responsible for elevating and breaking many of their careers. Schneider is Rick Rubin for a new generation. You bring him a good voice, he'll make something everyone wants to see.
Music may be Schneider's life and work now, but when the 27-year-old really wants to show off, he'll play two games of chess at a time. Blindfolded. "All the great players can do it," he says, shrugging.
While he was growing up outside of Philadelphia, Schneider's parents had a rule: you can do and be anything you want, but you have to practice something. After four weeks of piano lessons, young Kurt decided music wasn't it. He eventually landed on chess, which consumed his life for a decade. He became a chess master at 15, and was one of the best junior players in the country. As he got to the end of high school, though, he'd reached the point where the only way to get better was to commit fully. "It doesn't matter if it's chess or ballet or sports," he says, over bowls of pho at a small restaurant down the street from his new house. "If you want to be the best at something, you have to do it to the exclusion of everything else." Unwilling to make the sacrifice, Schneider mostly stopped playing chess, and began college at Yale in 2006 the way most kids begin college: completely unsure about the future.
Yale has a renowned music program, but Schneider declared a math major because he knew he'd ace his classes without trying very hard. It came easy; he still remembers the one B+ he got, and that was only because he accidentally skipped the midterm. (He wound up graduating magna cum laude, which says a little about grade inflation and a lot about the fact that Schneider seems to be exceptional at basically everything he tries.) While he was supposed to be in class, he was mostly hanging out in the school's Digital Media Center for the Arts. He'd gotten a job there, mostly for the perks: unfettered off-hours access to two studios, plus a whole bunch of audio and video recording equipment. The studio quickly became a second home—Schneider and his friends kept a sleeping bag in one of the recording rooms, just in case.
With help from a much-loved lab director named Lee Faulkner, Schneider began learning his way around the lab's many systems: software like Logic and Cubase, the ins and outs of recording and mixing. Once he had a grasp of things, he started inviting music students to work with him. He needed guinea pigs, and they needed his help. They were all good musicians, but had no idea how to make themselves sound good. "All their recordings sounded terrible," Schneider remembers. "Underwater, muffled, just bad." So he made them all the same offer: come to the studio, do your thing, and he'd handle the rest.
At the same time, he was beginning to experiment with all the camera equipment in the studio. In a world full of great music, he'd realized at some point, music isn't enough. "Most musicians on YouTube focus entirely on the audio," he says. "But if people just wanted to hear something great they would go on Spotify or Pandora, or open their iTunes library or something. You go on YouTube because you want to see something really cool."
The first video Schneider ever put on YouTube—the reason he created his channel in the first place—was a commercial he made for Yale's closed-circuit TV network, YTV. Schneider wrote a shockingly catchy song about two kids who don't want to go out and party, they just want to hang out in their dorm and watch YTV. It played all over campus, and its two stars became minor campus celebrities. Weeks later, a blog called IvyGate, which is like Gawker for Ivy Leaguers and is a real thing that exists, saw the spot. The post wasn't nice—"YTV Attempts to Out-Gay Harvard Crooner," the headline snarked—but it sent 15,000 viewers to his campy commercial. Schneider couldn't believe there were so many people watching dumb videos online. And he wanted to make more of them. In 2007, though, "YouTuber" wasn't a job title. And YouTube was only beginning to figure out its place in the music world.
It's still doing that, actually. The music industry wants more money out of YouTube, but it desperately needs YouTube's unmatched size and reach. Even as the platform has grown to a billion-plus users and an effectively infinite video catalog, music remains its most popular genre by far. And over time, the platform has shifted from a discovery engine to a full-fledged music platform. YouTube Red lets you listen without ads; YouTube Music is a rich and dedicated streaming service. And the platform is still uniquely artist-friendly. "You see some of the successful YouTube artists," says industry analyst Mark Mulligan, "they started off doing covers, because covers is an immediate way to build a relationship with an audience." They'd show up in related videos and search results, and fans would encounter artists that felt like more than a faceless brand. That kind of interaction was critical. "They're liking and sharing, remixing, covering music that they love," says Vivien Lewit, YouTube's head of artist relations. "And that expression and new creation of sorts, just helps drive new community around video."
Now, most high-profile YouTubers like Schneider could get record deals in an instant. Labels are clamoring to sign them. And that used to be the goal. "Part of my function many years ago," Lewit says, "was that I would be someone who would try to present opportunities to the artists by introducing them to record labels." She still works to land artists like Schneider deals for TV, movies, and books, but YouTube is the center of the universe. "Signing a deal to a record label or TV network isn't going to give you as big an audience as you have on YouTube," Mulligan says. "And it will constrain what you can do." This new breed of do-everything artists want control. And it's not like they need radio play to get discovered.
For Schneider, keeping control means freedom to try weird stuff. And weird stuff is, at least in part, what's made him so successful. You can see it all the way back to October of 2008, in the first video that Schneider likes enough to still have public on his channel. It's a cover of "Can I Have This Dance," from High School Musical 3. Schneider and some friends saw the movie on opening weekend, and knew the song would be a hit. So he asked Tsui and another friend, Rachel, if they wanted to record a duet. Both said sure, but the night before, Rachel cancelled. Schneider had been playing around with an idea, though. Maybe he could clone Tsui, so the singer would be able to duet with himself. And maybe that would be cooler. Maybe people would share it. He recorded four different vocal parts with Tsui, then stayed up all night editing and mixing and learning how to do the whole cloning thing.
The video opens on two empty stools in front of a white screen. You can see the rolls of paper on the floor, and the frame for the screen around the edges. (Schneider's production value has gone up a bit since this video.) Tsui walks out in a red sweatshirt, holding a microphone. He sits down, smiles, and starts singing. A few seconds later, another Tsui comes out. Same red sweatshirt, same microphone. He sits in the stool next to himself, and starts singing the harmony. Two other Tsuis come and go throughout the song. Even watching it now, it's a cool effect.
In its first day, the video got 1,000 views. "It was probably because the movie was popular," Schneider says, "so people were searching for the song." It was Schneider's biggest debut yet, and validation of his theory about shareability. Ever since that day, he gives the same advice to people who ask about how to be successful on YouTube. "You have to answer the question, 'why does someone want to share this video?' And if you don't have an answer to that question, it's probably not going to do well." Good singers singing songs? Fine. Good singers singing popular, new songs? Better. A guy singing a duet with himself? Now that's shareable. Go down the list of YouTube's most popular music videos, and there's always that one thing that made people share it. That's the secret sauce.
If you want to talk shareable, though, what happened in June of 2009 might be hard for Schneider—or anyone—to top. Michael Jackson had just died, and a friend asked him to arrange a medley for his Duke a cappella group, which they'd sing as a tribute. Schneider did the arrangement, and decided it was too good to just use for one concert and never hear again. So he and Tsui made a video. This time it's six Tsuis on stage, singing the medley in six-part harmony, with Schneider off to the left on percussion.
Schneider uploaded the video on July 24, 2009. About a month later, it had about 100,000 views, which was "by far the best any video had ever done for us," Schneider says. But then on August 29, Perez Hilton, the snark-tastic blogger still at the peak of his powers, tweeted the video. Cue explosion. By the next day, the video was on Fox News and the Yahoo homepage. Ellen DeGeneres called. So did Oprah. By the end of that summer, Schneider and Tsui had gone fully, certifiably, life-changingly viral. And things never really slowed down again.
Fast forward to 2016, and Schneider's is now the 34th most popular music channel on YouTube, and number 121 overall. (Number 122? The NBA.) On the music list, virtually everyone above Schneider is either Miley Cyrus or someone equally mainstream. Still below him on the charts? Calvin Harris, Lady Gaga, and, uh, everyone else on the planet. He adds about 3,300 new subscribers every day. He's done branded videos with companies like Samsung, Buick, and Coca-Cola, including a Coke ad that ran during the Super Bowl. He's as big a star as anyone on YouTube not named PewDiePie.
But the more Schneider has come to understand how YouTube and the Internet work, the more he understands how unstable it all can be. And in the YouTube music scene, there's no more cautionary tale than Dave Days. In 2011, Days and his pop-punk song covers and parodies had more subscribers than any other musician on YouTube. But he never changed his approach, or his material, and now his subscriber and view counts dwindle toward zero. It's easy to win fans on the Internet, and even easier to lose them.
Schneider's way of staying relevant is to constantly change. As soon as Schneider masters something, he moves onto something else, not unlike the way Louis CK throws out his material every year and starts over. He has to: the YouTube zeitgeist moves so quickly, and so many people are copying and learning from the videos they see, that it's hard to ever remember who did things first. After Schneider's cover of Nelly's "Just a Dream" came out, for instance, people loved the editing style he'd used. He calls it a box edit, layering three or four instruments and singers simultaneously into the frame. It immediately became his most popular video, racking up more than 100 million views to date, and Schneider attributes the success at least in part to the editing style. But as soon as it went viral, he says, "everybody fucking ripped it off." Schneider doesn't curse much, and always apologizes when he does. But this stuff makes him mad. And it makes him try harder.
Over time, he's ramped up the difficulty of his work to the point where it's hard to even copy—like the one-take videos he's become known for, artfully choreographed so that as the camera moves through a house, or down the street, the talent flows all around the frame. Every shoot starts in Schneider's notebook: "I draw the room," he says, "and then each person is a letter." He draws everyone's path, and they shoot over and over until they get it right.
Schneider's done one-takes on Segways and hoverboards, and he has this idea about having the singers catch and release a drone during a one-take. He's done a couple of 360-degree videos, too. And he loves playing weird instruments, or playing three instruments in one video, or using traffic sounds as percussion. He does popular songs, old songs, more and more original songs. Even when he does branded videos, he finds cool ways to integrate the product—forget just driving in a Buick, he's going to make every sound in the video with a Buick. He's on a relentless search for the next shareable thing. And he has a unique freedom to experiment because it's what his audience expects. That goes all the way back to the fact that it's not just Schneider on camera. "Most channels on YouTube," Schneider says, "especially music channels, it's just the artist. And every video is this person singing. Or whatever. Whereas my channel, I can have anyone singing. I can kind of do anything."
This approach has turned Schneider into a resource not just for other YouTubers looking for an edge, but for anyone looking for new ideas about music videos. When Avicii wanted to make the first-ever 360-degree music video for his song "Waiting for Love," he called Schneider. So did Rixton, for "Me And My Broken Heart." "I think if it was just a normal music video, I wouldn't be at the top of the list to direct it," Schneider says. But because it's YouTube, and because it's new tech, he's the guy. (A few days before we meet, fellow YouTube sensation Todrick Hall called Schneider for 360-degree shooting tips.) Schneider's worked with other A-listers like Jason Derulo and Hunter Hayes, YouTube stars like Bethany Mota, and many more. He recently struck a deal with Sony to do videos with some of the label's top talent, too. "I was attracted to him for his director's eye, and his creative videos," says Lee Stimmel, Sony's head of original content. "They're really, really different. And it's hard to stand out in that space." In every case, it's the same offer as always: come to the studio, do your thing, and he'll do the rest.
A few days after the Kayla-inspired shoot with Tsui, Schneider is back in the same downtown LA studio, shooting with Austin Percario, a 20-year-old singer. Today's song is the James Bay ballad "Let it Go." Schneider's given himself the task playing piano and tambourine simultaneously, and he's sitting on the bench trying to work out the rhythm. Normally, Schneider has singers just sing—"It makes my life easier," he says, “in that I only have to worry about me doing all the random things”—but today, he's assigned Percario the job of violently hitting the bass drum during the song's emotional ending. Percario's nervous about it. He listens to the track over and over, playing air drums to get the beat just right, nodding in time with the click in the audio. After a few full rehearsals, he and Schneider are both satisfied they've got it down. While Percario checks his hair, Schneider throws on his vest and checks the lighting for approximately the 93rd time. Then he jogs over to the stereo to restart the track on his iPhone, and they start shooting.
Like many of Schneider's collaborators, Percario came to him. After auditioning for American Idol and the X Factor, Percario was desperate to do more music. "I emailed his dad like four times before I got a response," Percario tells me. He's worked with Schneider a couple of times now, and he's finally getting over the awkwardness of singing into a camera over a track of your own voice. The drum part is the most Schneider's ever asked him to do, and once Percario gets the hang of it he gets way into it.
All things considered, this shoot isn't terribly complex. It's not a one-take, it doesn't involve segways or complicated dance routines. It's just Schneider and Percario. The whole thing only takes about two hours, and maybe a half-dozen plays of "Let it Go." When they finish, Manny Figs, Schneider's cameraman and only full-time employee, heads home to do a first pass on the edit. Once he's done, Schneider will spend the next few weeks tweaking and perfecting. For now, Schneider gets back into his car, which has a harp in the back he's teaching himself how to play, and heads home. He has more videos to work on, more songs to learn and write, more potential collaborators to vet. In the room next to his home studio, he's set up a new instrument, a series of carefully carved bamboo tubes called an angklung. A fan gave it to him, and he wants to use it in a video. He has no idea how to play it, of course, but that's no problem. He'll figure it out.
