Chapter XXX XXXXX 8 SHAWN MENDES SUPERSTAR NEXT DOOR Shawn does a stripped-down performance for fans in London
SHAWN MENDES SUPERSTAR NEXT DOOR 9 Chapter One Life of the Party He’s talented He’s tech-savvy He’s a teenager And he’s taking the world by storm Shawn already has a 1 album his full-length debut Handwri en has had six singles and counting crack the Billboard 100 and headlined a world tour Not bad for a kid who just graduated high school He’s been hailed by critics and fans alike as the next Justin Bieber a comparison he accepts with a humbleness beyond his years Being compared to him is great he told Digital Spy He is super talented And surely the two Canadians have plenty in common For starters they both owe their start to the Internet Justin was famously discovered a er posting YouTube videos of himself singing covers of various pop and R B songs and quickly found a record deal with RBMG headed by Usher one of the very artists he covered We all know the rest of the story Shawn a self-taught singer and guitarist has been called the first Vine superstar But in an Internet landscape where every YouTube cover artist is aiming to be discovered becoming a world-famous musician isn’t what Shawn set out to be Instead he started posting six-second snippets on Vine just to amuse himself and his friends It was a habit and a fun thing to do a er school in a boring town he told Rolling Stone Indeed it wasn’t until he started to get a response that he started to think bigger He posted a short cover of a lesser-known Justin Bieber ballad and it got a ention immediately he was literally an overnight success I posted this li le six-and-a-half-second clip of me singing I woke up the next morning and I had like 10,000 followers I was like Okay I guess I should go with this he told KiSS-FM Before long he was one of the most popular contributors on Vine He kept on posting and the social media momentum kept on building Soon his followers were requesting songs for him to sing They were telling their friends BY THE NUMBERS The number of copies of Handwritten sold in the first week reaching 1 on the Billboard 200 119,000
