Shawn Mendes has a retort for those who knock Vine — the popular mobile app for six-second videos — as a creative medium.
“People could say, ‘Well, it doesn’t take much talent to put a six-second video up,’” said Mendes, 16, whose torrent of Vine videos began in 2013 and includes hundreds of micro-covers of songs by Ed Sheeran, Beyonce, Sam Smith and others.
“I would argue that it does, because you only have six seconds to impress somebody,” he said. “And if you can do that in six seconds, then you’ve done a good job.”
This week, Mendes, a clean-cut 11th-grader from Pickering, Ontario, impressed an awful lot of people in the music industry. His debut album, Handwritten (Island), opened at number one on the Billboard chart, beating out the Furious 7 soundtrack and new releases by Reba McEntire and Tyler, the Creator.
In the process, Mendes has come to symbolise the rapid changes in how new artists are bubbling up through the internet and social media, and how the music business assimilates them. Over the past decade, the platform of choice for new acts has gone from MySpace to YouTube to apps such as Vine and Instagram — where the audience includes not only young fans but also established stars and talent agents on the prowl.
“This is a moment where the up-and-comers and the stars and the wannabes are all on the same platform,” said Matty Karas, the curator of MusicRedef, an online aggregator of news and commentary.
The success of Mendes’ album — it sold 106,000 copies and was streamed 4.8 million times — is all the more notable since it does not have a radio hit. But while record companies still prize radio play, it has become just one part of the promotional portfolio. According to Mendes’ Vine page, his videos have 367 million loops, or views.
Last week, Furious 7 reached number one, with a record number of online streams for the song See You Again, which plays during the film’s end credits. The song’s popularity was helped by the app Shazam, which was used 1.1 million times that week to identify the track — perhaps while viewers were still in their seats at the theatre.
Among the other acts that have made an impression on Vine — which is owned by Twitter — are Us the Duo, signed to Universal’s Republic label, and the rapper Bobby Shmurda, who had a breakout moment when a dance from one of his videos was excerpted on the app and mimicked widely.
Speaking by phone from a tour stop in Santa Ana, California, Mendes described his rise on Vine as almost an accident, although one that he was keen to pounce on.
“When I put that first Vine out, I was just doing it for fun; there was no wanting to become an artist,” he said. “But then when I realised the potential it had, I thought Vine was the perfect platform because no one else was doing it. I would have been one of the only ones, or one of the first.”
Mendes posted videos of himself cradling a guitar, making eyes at the camera or just lounging at home in suburban Toronto, and within months his career began to take off. He was part of Magcon, a tour of teenage social-media stars and was contacted by Andrew Gertler, an artist manager, who persuaded him and his family to meet with record companies in New York.
“The biggest hurdle for them was whether to do a record deal at all or continue on independently,” Gertler said of Mendes and his parents. “It wasn’t, ‘What are you going to do to my baby?’”
Last year, Mendes signed with Island, a division of Universal, and released an EP of original songs, which opened at number five. Next month, he will be an opening act on Taylor Swift’s world tour — a position that helped make a star of Sheeran, whose heart-baring singer-songwriter style is a model for Mendes.
As a cherubic singer whose stardom began on social media, Mendes has been widely characterised as another Justin Bieber (who also grew up in Ontario). But Mendes’ handlers take pains to distance him from that comparison and predict a blossoming career.
“In terms of his raw talent, I feel that he’s capable of growing in a way that Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have grown,” David Massey, Island’s chief executive, said.
The life cycle of Vine-bred stars is still undetermined. Us the Duo’s album, No Matter Where You Are, failed to crack Billboard’s chart, although the group remains prolific on Vine. Others who have had huge viral hits turned radio staples, such as Psy (Gangnam Style) and Carly Rae Jepsen (Call Me Maybe), have struggled to replicate that success.
Panos Panay, director of the Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship at the Berklee College of Music, said quick ups and downs have simply become a reality for the industry in an online-driven market.
“The labels are adjusting to an environment where stars will be as ephemeral as a text message,” Panay said.
Mendes said he was in it for the long haul. He has not set foot in his school since last year, he said — his homework is sent to him online, and a family member or guardian is always present on tour — and he is still adjusting to the marvels of the pop-star life.
In December, he said, he found himself at Swift’s birthday party at her apartment in New York, surrounded by superstars such as Jay Z, Beyonce and Justin Timberlake. “It was very crazy,” he said, but he kept it together.
“You just have to play it cool,” Mendes said. “You don’t want everyone to know you’re an amateur.”
