INTERVIEW: Piano Guys have more than 1.6 billion YouTube views (that’s billion with a ‘b’)

Photo: The Piano Guys feature Jon Schmidt on piano and Steven Sharp Nelson on cello. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by State Theatre with permission.

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The Piano Guys are one of the most welcome anomalies in the strange music industry. At a time when it’s difficult to sell albums, and everyone streams individual songs, the Piano Guys — consisting of Jon Schmidt, Steven Sharp Neslon, Paul Anderson and Al van der Beek — have bucked the trend and amassed more than 1.6 billion YouTube views.

That’s a startling statistic. More than 1.6 billion times someone clicked play on a video to watch these instrumental maestros do their thing.

And the success keeps going. The Piano Guys will play Tuesday, Sept. 10 at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where they will bring their original amalgam of classical music and pop to adoring audiences who wish to jump beyond the social media clips and engage with the band in person.

“We try to put ourselves in the fans’ shoes and imagine what are they hoping to hear, what are the things they love the most,” Schmidt said in a recent phone interview. “We try to do tunes that we think will work in the show, and you kind of have to test them out. You find out which ones work the best and get the best response.”

Schmidt is the pianist and songwriter for the group, while Nelson, also a songwriter, holds down duty on the cello. Anderson is the producer and videographer, while van der Beek serves as music producer and songwriter. Their live performances are a carefully orchestrated celebration that meets the needs and desires of the audience members who have made them crossover stars.

“You learn how to feel if the audience is into stuff or how into it they are, let’s say, and with a lot of trial and error over the years we found that certain of our songs they’re at the top of the scale, so to speak,” Schmidt said. “Those are our favorite ones to go to for the set list, and trying out new songs and stuff, it’s a process. You have to give it some time, and you have to give it a chance. And oftentimes, it just never quite feels like it got up into that 8, 9, 10 level on the scale of 1 to 10. And so it’s unfortunate, but you put a lot of time into rehearsing it, getting it ready, and then you’re like this one is just not resonating. That’s always a bummer.”

As an example, Schmidt discussed the song “Sky Full of Stars.” The Piano Guys tried the tune at several shows, but they couldn’t find that connection with the ticket buyers. So they decided rather than to nix the song, they would change it up a bit.

“We added some video stuff that we hadn’t done before, and it was even more awesome,” he said. “And now we like it so much that we’re going to start the entire show with it, but the first two or three times, we were about to ditch that tune and say, ‘As much as we love it, it’s not something the fans are responding to.’ So it’s tricky.”

The beginning stages of this musical project were not entirely planned out. Like most success stories in the industry, there was a good deal of luck and serendipity that catapulted the Piano Guys to such heights.

“It’s funny because I’ve got a good friend who teaches an entrepreneur class, and he said after interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs one thing that he found with the majority is that [their success] was serendipitous,” Schdmit said. “They had been doing things because they had an interest, or because they had a passion or felt like it was something that was a hobby. And then they met somebody else that had their thing going on, and it was just this happy serendipity that happened. And we definitely feel like that happened with us.”

Schmidt had a solo career playing original piano music, mostly in the western states. He built a respectable following, and in his live shows, he started performing with Nelson, a cellist.

“I’ve got a tune that would be really nice to have cello on,” he said. “I’m like, hey, can I borrow you for this tune and my set, and it just over the years has developed into a greater and greater collaboration where we just did more and more tunes. And then on one show I’m like I’ve got to give this guy a mic because he’s so funny. It was such a good decision because he has a world-class sense of humor. His mind is as fast as Ellen’s. Ellen Degeneres is the queen. No one is better than her, but he like matches her. He’s so comedic and so funny. It was just this added element to the show where it was sort of a Smothers Brothers vibe where he’s the funny one, and I’m the straight one. And every once in awhile I do something funny. It’s just this added element that I think surprises people in the live show, but no one could see it coming.”

They had their live act down, but the audience was still at a distance. That is until Schmidt made a connection with a friend who owned a piano store. This friend was sick of advertising in newspapers and on the radio, so he decided to jump on the bandwagon of social media marketing.

“So we started putting up more videos on his channel, which was called the Piano Guys, and that name is something we actually have tried to change for the sake of Steve who plays the cello,” Schmidt said with a laugh. “It’s so stupid that he has to be known as the Piano Guy, but for us to change the name, we would have had to have lost millions of hits that had accrued while I was just doing a favor for a good friend of mine, for his piano store and trying different things. And then Steve came in and tried a few things, but we had no idea that it would take off and become a career and a partnership. And by the time the partnership formed, it was just too late to change the name of the YouTube channel. So poor Steve has to be known as the Piano Guy.”

Nelson’s friend owned a recording studio, and the stars started to align in their favor.

Social media? Check.

Recording studio? Check.

They had all of the tools necessary to capture a larger audience.

“We just kind of hit right at that moment,” he said. “It was extremely fortunate timing that way. It was sort of like people who were in entertainment and music in the late ’40s / early ’50s when radio hit. It was just really great timing, and we had a fanbase in place that could spread the word and share the stuff we were making.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

The Piano Guys will perform Tuesday, Sept. 10 at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.

Revised 9/19