This YouTuber built a massive following with pop music guitar lessons
A lot of people conduct searches for instructions on how to play their favorite songs.
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In late December, a TikTok user named Nathan Evans uploaded his rendition of “Wellerman,” a haunting and catchy whaling song that originated in New Zealand sometime in the 1800s. The video went viral on the platform, amassing over 1.2 million likes, but more importantly, it spawned an entire genre of spin-off videos collectively referred to as “Sea Shanty TikTok.” What started as simple add-on choruses to Evans’s original video soon evolved into remixes, mashups, and even sea shanty adaptations of modern pop songs.
As is often the case, New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz was early to spot the trend and posted about it on Twitter. That’s how Youtuber David Potsiadlo first came across it. Over the past few years, Potsiadlo has amassed 260,000 subscribers and 32 million views on YouTube by teaching his audience how to play popular songs on the guitar. “[Sea Shanty TikTok] kind of immediately struck a chord with me,” he told me recently. “I loved how participatory this was and how simple the song was, and how it could just lend itself to all different genres.”
Given that “Wellerman” was nearly 200 years old, Potsiadlo assumed that someone had already posted a guitar lesson for it on YouTube, but his searches turned up empty. He knew from prior experience that if he could be among the first to post a guitar lesson for a culturally-entrenched song, then the video would pay dividends far into the future. “Typically I don't do newer music too much, but I knew that doing a song that has a bit more cultural cache could be a good way to pull in a younger audience.”
So Potsiadlo did what he always does with his guitar lessons. He first reverse engineered the chord progressions, a relatively easy task given the song’s simplicity. He then recorded a video, opening it with a shot of himself playing a small snippet of the song. Next, the video launches into the lesson itself, showing a close up of his hands on his guitar. As Potsiadlo moves through the verses, the screen flashes graphics that display the actual fret fingering, and he discusses various techniques for how to strum the chords. At the end of the video, he encourages viewers to visit his website to view his annotated notes and lyrics.
Potsiadlo posted the video on January 13, and it quickly climbed to over 26,000 views in just a matter of days. More importantly, it’s one of the top search results on YouTube and Google when you search for “Wellerman guitar tutorial,” which is a good early sign that people will continue landing on it far into the future. Many of Potsiadlo's most popular videos -- those that have millions of views -- amassed their massive audiences over a period of years as people plugged “[song title] + “guitar lesson”] into their search engines of choice. With any luck, his “Wellerman” video will see similar success.
Potsiadlo didn’t start posting regularly to YouTube until four years ago, but the genesis for his online guitar lessons stretches back two decades to when he was in college. He’d grown up taking piano lessons without developing much of a passion for the instrument. He quit by the time he started at the University of Maryland, but he soon grew interested in the guitar. “I was taking a music theory class as an elective just to fill up some requirement,” he told me. “And I started to connect the dots; I had learned all this music theory over the years that I had filed away at the back of my brain, and I realized I could apply most of it to playing the guitar.”
Potsiadlo soon learned he had an almost preternatural ability to listen to a song and transpose it for the guitar. This was during a distinctly Web 1.0 era, so he started posting his guitar notations of popular song lyrics to a Geocities website that he only shared with his friends. He didn’t keep that site going long, but over the next several years he kept up the guitar notation habit and would circulate new pop songs to friends via email.
After graduating, Potsiadlo entered a career in web programming and design, and over a period of years he built up enough of a skillset that he felt confident enough to build an actual CMS that could serve as a database for his sheet music. The CMS allowed for him to enter in various fields -- including the song name and artist -- that made the sheet music more easily searchable, both within the website and on Google. Within a short period of time, his site started attracting between 3,000 and 4,000 visitors a month, mostly from Google. “But it didn't mean anything to me,” he said. “I wasn't receiving emails from people who visited the website. I wasn't doing anything to monetize that audience. I had no entrepreneurial thrust or desire at that time.” His motivation for posting was simply that he enjoyed doing it.
YouTube changed that mindset for him. In 2013, Potsiadlo stumbled upon several channels that provided guitar tutorials for famous songs, and some of them had racked up serious followings. It opened his eyes to the notion that there was a mass market for this type of content.
The guitar, after all, is the closest we have to a universally playable instrument. Most instruments require years of lessons and practice before someone could play something that sounds impressive to the average person, and yet with guitar you can sometimes learn to play a decent rendition of your favorite rock song within a single afternoon. “The guitar can fit in the dorm room, it can fit in the closet,” Potsiadlo explained. “If you can just learn three chords, you could, in theory, pull off something that sounds impressive, as long as you have confidence and some semblance of rhythm.”
Browsing these YouTube channels in 2013, Potsiadlo felt he could produce something better. “The one thing that surprised me like crazy at the time was that the graphics in their videos were almost nonexistent.” When teaching someone to play guitar, the teacher’s hands almost always get in the way of the strings, making it extremely difficult for a beginner to understand the various fingering positions for chords. “I just realized immediately that I could make a visual diagram of each chord that I reuse in every video where that chord is used, and that's going to provide just immediate high value to the viewer who’s trying to learn that song.”
Potsiadlo soon landed on a strategy: he’d record and edit a bunch of videos -- at least a dozen -- in a very short period of time and then post them to YouTube as a sort of “minimal viable product.” From there he could sit back and observe what worked and what didn’t. “I had the sense of mind that if I was going to spend about a month doing this, I should experiment with a wide sample here,” he said. “So I did some of the new indie pop stuff I was listening to at the time, but also I did a few Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen songs and other classics as well.”
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