Roomie.

How to Get Subscribers! Ft. Boyinaband

Some thoughts on live singing videos on youtube. 

Recently a lot of people have been asking me why I didn’t upload any youtube videos for almost three months. Some accused me of slacking/being lazy, some were just puzzled how it could happen when this is my full-time job.

I didn’t want to address this initially - compared to most YouTubers, I don’t like to open up and talk about my feelings that much. I’m not a vlogger. I ended up on youtube because I wanted to find an audience for my music, not for my personality.

Last year, a few things happened that changed me. First off, I received more exposure than I’ve ever had before, due to the virality of my “One Guy, 14/15/23 Voices” videos going around Facebook (And to some extent YouTube). I was interviewed/performed on many big TV shows around the world (As an impressionist, mind you, which most of you know is not the core of what I do). It was a very nice, yet very stressful experience - I started grinding my teeth during sleeping this period and ended up with “Craze Lines” on my front teeth - not a serious thing really, but it showed that I was under more stress than I’ve ever been.

Furthermore, I made a Patreon page. This is probably the scariest and best thing I’ve ever done as  a YouTuber, and I’m really grateful for all the support people are giving me there. It’s humbling and amazing.

However, based on these two experiences - wanting to one-up the success I had last year, and handling the fact that ordinary (yet awesome) people are supporting me financially to make better videos - really got to me. I built a huge obstacle in my head where my next video needed to be the best thing imaginable. I put all this over-ambition into my upcoming Pewdiepie song. I think I’ve written and rewritten the song about 10-15 times. I’ve recorded vocals for it for approximately 100-200 hours, never feeling that a given take was good enough. I hired a producer to make the instrumental, because after trying multiple times I didn’t feel like I could do it good enough. I upgraded my recording studio because I felt my gear wasn’t giving me a good enough vocal sound for the song. I’m now hiring an animator to animate most of the video, because I feel like the ordinary way I make videos isn’t good enough.

A quick googling puts me somewhere on the way to having Atelophobia, an anxiety disorder, the fear of not being good enough or imperfection. This is, of course, an internet self-diagnosis and should be taken with a few tons of salt. But the truth is, the reason I haven’t been releasing videos isn’t that I’ve been lazy, or that I don’t care. I haven’t been uploading videos because I want to make the best possible music and videos for my audience, to an extent that sometimes works against me.

Thanks for reading.

New video - Nailing Lil Jon! Can’t believe this actually happened!