Hong Kong welcomes YouTube singing star Kina Grannis back for an encore

If you spend much time on YouTube, chances are you’ve come across singer-songwriter Kina Grannis.  

In one video, she’s playfully skipping across a beach in California with friend and fellow YouTube star David Choi. In another, she’s harmonising with Canadian band Boyce Avenue. And in her latest, she’s plucking her guitar with the blonde Gardiner Sisters as they sing sweet harmonies. Grannis, who doesn’t seem to have met a chart-topping pop song she couldn’t retool into a honeyed acoustic pop song, has more than a million subscribers, has made more than 350 videos and is the perfect ambassador for the power of social media.

In many ways, the internet helped make Grannis, who is set to return to Hong Kong on September 20, the artist she is today. Less than a decade ago, the 30-year-old Southern California native was, in her own words, “doing the starving artist thing, singing at open mic nights”. Then, in 2007, she entered a nationwide talent competition titled “Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest”, sponsored by US snack food company Frito-Lay.  

After the audience voted Grannis into the nationwide top 10, she started experimenting with the relatively new YouTube platform to see how she could make the participation process fun for other people. “At some point it started exploding, and that’s when I realised that I had stumbled on something very powerful,” she says. “Fast forward two months, I end up winning the contest, thanks to the following on YouTube, and I sign up with a major label.”

Grannis suddenly had everything she ever wanted – but soon realised she didn’t. “I realised that the family I had was the internet,” she says. “The label [Universal] wanted me to be a certain artist, and write with certain people and scrap the album that I already did. They were thinking I was a female version of [US soft-rocker] Jack Johnson.”  

Grannis decided to leave the label and see how far social media could take her. And as it turns out, that was quite far. She has 150 million views on YouTube. The stop-animation video for her track In Your Arms, which took two years to make and used almost 300,000 jelly beans, has received more than 10 million views. “It’s a path that’s constantly changing,” she says about forging a career via the internet. “On top of that, when you’re on a label, you get to be the artist; when you’re on your own, you’re the businessman and the artist.”