How The Chainsmokers made YouTube their playground

Apr 7, 2017

Anyone who has ever seen footage of The Chainsmokers in concert knows how dynamic they are: Running, leaping, and dodging pyrotechnics, they own every inch of the stage. But that’s nothing compared to their command of YouTube, where their music has arguably made its biggest impact.

The New York duo—whose debut, Memories… Do Not Open, arrives April 7—currently holds the world record for the most-viewed lyric video with “Closer,” which was the first lyric video to break one billion views (it’s at 1.38 billion views and counting). In March, they broke the record for the most single-day views of a lyric video with their Coldplay collaboration “Something Just Like This,” racking up over nine million views in 24 hours. (A little over a month later, that number has grown to over 170 million.) For the last two weeks of March, The Chainsmokers held the No. 2 overall position on the YouTube Music Charts, and they currently have five videos in the Top 100; as of this writing, their total views number nearly six billion. “We don’t really think about breaking records—it’s just something that’s been happening,” says Disruptor Records’ Adam Alpert, The Chainsmokers’ manager, chuckling. But their success is no fluke: Despite their low-key, happy-go-lucky on-screen personas, the duo’s Drew Taggart and Alex Pall take their video content strategy very seriously.

“One thing that we consciously decided long ago, when The Chainsmokers first formed, was that we wanted to deliver to the fans consistently and regularly, in every way possible,” Alpert says. As a result, The Chainsmokers have opened up the faucet on a steady stream of video content that includes traditional music videos, audio-only uploads, lyric clips, behind-the-scenes content, production tutorials, and pretty much anything else the duo and their team might dream up. “We’ve been very diligent about making sure there’s a video for every song, whether it’s a quote-unquote single or not,” Alpert says. “We’ve basically been putting out a song every month for the last two years, and we’ve done a video for virtually every one.”

One tactic that differentiates The Chainsmokers is their multi-pronged approach: It’s not uncommon for them to release an audio-only clip, then a lyric video, and finally a full official video, all for the same song. And when it comes to lyric videos, gone are the days when some scrolling text against a static background would suffice—The Chainsmokers’ lyric videos comprise 49.6% of all their views.

The lyric video for their single “Closer,” directed by their frequent collaborator Rory Kramer, is a fully scripted spot starring the Instagram celebrities (and real-life couple) Alyssa Lynch and Jordan Taylor Wright as the song’s passionate lovers; the lyric video for “Paris,” also directed by Kramer, stars Alexis Ren, an Instagram model with more than 8 million followers. The duo followed up each of those with traditional narrative videos for the respective songs: “Closer” features Taggart and featured singer Halsey as the song’s star-crossed lovers; the dreamlike “Paris” stars Victoria’s Secret model Martha Hunt (and saves plenty of screen time for Taggart and Pall). Every one of these, in other words, isn’t so much a video as an event, bringing major talent to the table, and putting a whole new spin on the song.

“We recognize how long it takes to reach everybody,” says Alpert of the team’s extensive release strategy. “It’s a massive world, so you can’t expect to reach everybody with one video. You want people to have the opportunity to consume the audio on YouTube, and you want them to be able to learn the lyrics in a fun way, and you also want to provide them with a visual that speaks to the song itself. So we’ve tried to make as many things as possible for as many songs as possible.”

YouTube has been central to The Chainsmokers’ career from the beginning. The pair has been hosting the YouTube EDM15 radio show on SiriusXM for over two years, and their big breakthrough hit, 2014’s “#SELFIE,” was bolstered by a video cobbled together out of selfies submitted by fans and friends of the band, including snaps from Steve Aoki, Snoop Dogg, and even David Hasselhoff. Even before “#SELFIE” took off, though, The Chainsmokers were diligently building their personas on YouTube via a series of tongue-in-cheek videos like “Hard & Deep”—a comedy series with more than a little Anchorman in its DNA—and “Cloud Comments,” in which they gamely responded to negative feedback left for them on SoundCloud. “Early on, college kids would fall in love with their personalities," Alpert says. "They'd see a behind-the-scenes kind of video, and it’s like, ‘These guys are funny, we like these guys, let’s keep up with them.' Some people liked them before even becoming a fan of the music."

These days, their strategy for supplementary content is even more sophisticated. The flagship of their behind-the-scenes material is the “That Time” series, with dozens of episodes capturing everything from the excitement of their concerts to the gags and pratfalls of their downtime antics. “The fly-on-the-wall aspect came naturally,” says Alpert. “Letting the fans get to know Alex and Drew as individuals—their personalities, their humor, their trials and tribulations—has been a great way to connect, and not just be about the music.”

Musically, the “That Time” series also makes for a great way to get new, unreleased material in front of fans. Long before "Paris" had been officially released, fans could hear its refrain woven throughout the background of "That Time" clips. Alpert says, “We tease songs, we test songs, we tease remixes, and we’ve definitely seen responses, especially from the super-fans. Like, ‘What song is this? They posted something that we don’t know what it is, it’s gotta be one of their new songs!’ It gets people excited.”

Such direct-to-fan content can take many forms. Recently, The Chainsmokers produced an extensive behind-the-scenes look at the official “Paris” video; last September they recorded a jokey get-out-the-vote video encouraging their fans to register before the presidential election. Yet another ongoing feature is the duo’s series of production tutorials, in which they break down elements of their songs, like the drop in “Roses” or the guitar part from “Don’t Let Me Down.”

But perhaps the most important aspect of The Chainsmokers’ video strategy has been to document their growth as artists. EDM has evolved rapidly over the past half-decade, and as The Chainsmokers have gone from wisecracking DJs to some of pop’s biggest hitmakers, they’ve stayed one step ahead of the game the whole way—and YouTube has played an important role in capturing their journey. “How they’ve crossed over into the quote-unquote pop world is by just not caring what other people are doing, and really not trying to follow any rules,” Alpert says. “That can be seen in the videos they put out. It’s just been about letting the fans watch along the way. Whether that’s The Chainsmokers’ comedy or ‘That Time’ or the lyric videos or the official music videos, they’re bringing them along for the ride.”