Kina Grannis Builds Huge Fan Base Through YouTube

Kina Grannis is a superstar, but you’ve probably never heard of her. Her brand new album, Elements, was not reviewed by a single major music publication in the country the week of its release, but Grannis has developed a stable, successful career over the last decade as a singer-songwriter ‪by subverting the old-fashioned music business altogether.

Grannis’ tool of choice is the internet, where the 28-year-old singer provides her many hundreds of thousands of fans, subscribers, and followers with a constant supply of interactive updates. Grannis’ YouTube page, which boasts just under one million subscribers (for reference, country megastar Luke Bryan has five hundred thousand), is the home base of the Los Angeles-based singer’s internet stardom, featuring hundreds of videos that range from behind the scenes exclusives, to personal notes from Grannis, to, most typically, acoustic bedroom covers that span a wide swath of contemporary pop music, from Bon Iver to Rihanna.

Although Grannis’ 21st century, techno-friendly approach to her career is distinctly ahead of the curve, her music is anything but avant-garde. The California singer’s genre of choice is folksy pop, and her latest album, Elements, is a collection of expertly-crafted songs about fading love and adult reckoning.

Elements is a coming of age record, or as Grannis puts it, an album about “owning up to yourself.” On “Forever Blue,” a song that was partially written in the midst of her grandfather’s death, Grannis confronts a life-long fear of mortality with a simple revelation. “My father has a father too,” she sings with a deep, sweet sadness in the song’s chorus. Elsewhere, the sparkly opener “Dear River” echoes Jenny Lewis’ weary romanticism, while “Maryanne” is a slow burning reflection on a love triangle that ended up well for at least two sides.

When I ask Grannis about “Maryanne,” she stalls for a moment, fumbling for a public explanation of a seemingly deeply private backstory behind the song. “How would I discuss Maryanne …” she says, “It’s kind of about these people and things that lead you to where you need to be, in a very ambiguous sense. Sometimes you need to learn things by just trying some things out, whether it’s right or wrong.”

Such vagueness goes to show that even the most social media-reliant, oversharing artist still needs to protect their fair share of privacy. Maintaining such a balance is just one of several challenges Grannis has faced in her primarily internet-based musical career over the past several years.Apart from the obvious drawback of having to read the anonymous internet comments (“you try to take them with a grain of salt, but it gets hard sometimes,” she says), the singer has found that it has been shockingly hard to convince old-fashioned music biz insiders like club promoters that she’s a legitimate artist, and not just a viral video novelty.

“There can be a stigma to it, which I’ve found a little bit annoying,” she says. “People from the ‘real’ industry look at me and say ‘Oh, she’s just a YouTube artist.’ I do put music on YouTube but I’ve been writing songs for 12 years. I was busking on the street long before Youtube ever came around.”

Facing such widespread industry prejudice, a prejudice that’s hard not to also read as gendered, has taught Kina Grannis a lot. “I’ve always been a self-doubting person, and in the last few years I’ve had to stand up for myself a lot,” she says when describing the last few years of experiences that went into her latest record. On Elements, an album centered around the idea of self-confidence – as an artist, as an adult, as a lover, and as a woman – she faces her self-doubt head on. “I’ve always been a person who is very afraid of confrontation, but I’ve realized that’s not necessarily healthy,” Grannis says when discussing lead single “The Fire,” a song with more of a dark edge than most of her material.

At a recent concert in Brooklyn, I witnessed Grannis’ virtual fanbase in the flesh. Who were they? In addition to being the most diverse audience I’ve ever seen at a singer-songwriter show, the fans were attentive, eager, respectful, and gracious, thanking the singer for her music after each and every song. Performing an array of new music with her three-piece backing band, Grannis paused midway through the sold-out show to learn a little about her fans. “How many of you know me from the internet?” she asked, and the crowd erupted.

This article appears in our July/August 2014 issue. Buy it here or download it here. Or better yet, subscribe.