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
Chapter One Life of the Party building fan sites devoted to him making their own tributes Vine isn’t a logical path to stardom Shawn admits but it worked for him People could say Well it doesn’t take much talent to put a six-second video up he told the New York Times 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 He started gaining momentum across other social media platforms too including Instagram Facebook Twi er and yes YouTube where fans could find more than six seconds of Shawn at a time It was on YouTube that he got the a ention of now-manager Andrew Gertler who was searching online for artists covering A Great Big World’s smash hit Say Something and randomly stumbled across Shawn’s version Gertler rushed to sign Shawn and soon there was a record deal in place with Island Records There was something about him that just struck me as different from every other kid on social media Gertler told AXS com Not only was his voice unique but he had a natural charisma that I don’t think you can learn Something just draws people to him It’s that relatability that fans echo when they talk about him too He really does feel like the superstar next door He could You only have six seconds to impress somebody on Vine And if you can do that in six seconds then you’ve done a good job 10 SHAWN MENDES SUPERSTAR NEXT DOOR
Shawn performs for his Chapter XXX hometown crowd on XXXX WE Day 2015 in Toronto SHAWN MENDES SUPERSTAR NEXT DOOR 11
