At just 19, YouTube star Victoria Preston has entered the
top 10 charts with her latest single “hazy days” and is set to become one of
the UK’s biggest artists. Harmony interviewed Victoria to find out her story of
how she went from being a first year university student, receiving up to 100
likes on her covers, to publishing her own creations and gathering up to one
million subscribers.
Victoria was first known of under the channel name ‘In
Another Life’ covering songs by artists such as passenger, imagine dragons and
Bombay bicycle club… the cliché indie pop bands. Her YouTube channel was a
quiet place where she could “get away from the everyday and be whoever she
wanted”; however, it wasn’t until she turned new and upcoming band, Catfish and
the Bottlemen’s top track “Kathleen” into an acoustic melody that we really saw
her channel grow. This cover was released on the 12th of December
2014 and within the first day the likes and views slowly grew from faithful,
longstanding subscribers. But, the video didn’t reach its peak until,
unknowingly to Victoria, the famous band spotted a link to the video in mention
of theirs and sent out their re-tweet with the comment “you heard it here first”.
When we spoke to Victoria she said, “it raised from 200 to 20,000 in a blink. I
went from getting the occasional like or comment to my phone crashing from all
of the mentions and new followers on my twitter”. Victoria went on to tell us how she was
unaware of what had created the manic audience numbers until she later received
a text from a friend with a screenshot of the band’s tweet with the comment
“omg.”. From here Victoria’s confidence grew, alongside her new love of turning
indie rock songs into her own mellow acoustics. Her videos began to receive an
average of 10,000 views with larger audience numbers and a new found twitter
alliance with Catfish and the Bottlemen who clearly saw potential in this young
musician.
At the start of January 2015 Victoria released her first
single “hazy days” which received a great recommendation from her own
influential band Catfish and the Bottlemen. We questioned Victoria to why she
hadn’t released her own material before, and she admitted that the song was an
old creation that had been crossed through with the melody rewritten a dozen
times but she’d never had been brave enough to share her own construction. “I can take the dislikes on a cover but not on my own
lyrics”. Nonetheless Victoria’s
uncertainty was unnecessary as the video received 12,389 thumbs up in the first
48 hours and within the next fortnight the song was put onto iTunes at the
overwhelming request of fans. The song was first seen in the charts on the 11th
of January when this young singer was identified as a breakthrough artist, as
her song hit number 37. From here the song climbed its way through the charts,
passing rival artists such as clean bandit and George Ezra until it reached
position 9 on the 18th January 2015. Victoria said she was
overwhelmed at how the song had taken off since that first hectic day and she
was barely starting to believe just how many people had seen her sing let alone
the desires for her to release it for download. When asked about what she is
going to do with the money she has made Victoria laughed, “Well, I’m certainly
not going to spend it on a trip to Vegas or to drop out of university and live
off my music like you would expect. I thought about putting it into creating a
video to go with the song or for a posh studio to record anything new in
but…that’s not why those people subscribed to my channel and definitely not why
Catfish and the Bottlemen re-tweeted it. For now I think I’ll save it for a
rainy day”.
We asked Victoria what was next for her, would she be
continuing with her course at university or heading out to compete in the manic
music industry. She told us “although music is what I love to do, the past couple of months have been has been crazy for
me so I think I’m going to stick to university for now and after
that…who knows. Maybe I’ll get to experience that other life” [laughs]. It’s
clear that Victoria is a very talented artist but maybe she is too young to
take on this adventure just yet, but we sure aren’t going to underestimate her
in the upcoming months as there are definitely some more top 10 hits to be seen
from ‘In Another Life’.
Charlotte Hull, Harmony Magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment