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.