Piano Guys are not a new music group.
I have been listening to them for the last few days but I didn’t know their story till today. I just read this wikipedia article and this entrepreneur.com article.
It’s interesting how it all started with them trying to make videos to sell pianos and while that didn’t work, they figured out something much bigger instead.
Copying text from the entrepreneur.com article
Before it was ever a musical quartet, The Piano Guys was the name of a piano store in St. George, Utah. As part of a social-media marketing strategy, the shop’s owner, Paul Anderson, asked Nelson and a local pianist named Jon Schmidt to perform in video clips he could post to the store’s YouTube and Facebook pages.
“In no time,” goes a joke Nelson tells onstage, “the four of us had 54 videos up on YouTube, 600 million video views, four albums with Sony and 3.7 million YouTube subscribers — and we still hadn’t sold a single piano.”
I found it funny that the videos were so successful but they did not help in achieving the intended goal.
At the same time, they did get results in a different way.
Their deal with Sony is also very interesting – it’s four years old now but it goes to show that tradidtional ways of doing things are fast breaking up. The internet is (or may be the platforms are?) the middle men what big media companies were at one time.
I just found the story interesting so thought of sharing it.
Piano Guys does make fabulous music. Here’s their website and youtube channel.