“It wasn’t this thing that happened by accident,” Michael Alvarado says.
And like Mendes, they soon found that being “Vine famous” took work.
Like Mendes, they started with cover songs. Michael and Carissa Alvarado, the married folk-pop outfit who record as Us the Duo, signed to Republic Records this spring they are widely thought to be the first Vine stars to land a major record deal. Mendes is at the forefront of the first generation of Vine stars - singers, performers, dancers, comedians and whatevers who are attempting to use the online platform as a springboard to real-world success. It reached No. 1 on iTunes 37 minutes after it was released. Mendes soon signed with Island Records, which issued his self. That was one of the biggest eye-openers of my life.”Ī few weeks later, managers and record labels came calling. “I went to Toronto one afternoon for this Vine meet-up, and there was 2,000 people there cheering my name. Everything has come through Vine,” Mendes says in a recent phone interview. “It just started to pick up in this snowball effect to where I am now, which is insane. He began posting Vines - mostly covers of popular songs - almost every day. Mendes’s Bieber cover went viral, and he soon became a popular presence on Vine, a service that allows users to share six-second video clips. “I posted that first Vine and woke up the next morning with 10,000 followers. “I didn’t really want anything to happen I just kind of wanted to see what people would think,” says Mendes, 16. A year ago, Shawn Mendes filmed himself singing a tentative acoustic cover of the Justin Bieber song “ As Long as You Love Me” and put the results on Vine.