Kurt Schneider: The Chessmaster Who Turned Into the King of YouTube Music
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.
The entertainer
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.
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