Coloring Outside the Lines
A Fresh Approach to Online Music
A little while ago, when going to a live performance wasn’t life-threatening, some friends invited me to go to Brooklyn to see Mahalia, an artist I had never heard of. To entice me, they sent me clips from a YouTube channel called COLORSxSTUDIOS. Opening the channel I was confronted with a kaleidoscope of mostly individual performers in visually arresting fashions, each singing into an old-fashioned hanging mic against a backdrop of vivid, saturated color.
I found myself watching video after video that night, falling delightedly down the YouTube rabbit hole as I discovered new artists of every stripe, performing in a strangely intimate way within a virtually blank studio setting. I loved the Mahalia cuts and went gladly to her Brooklyn appearance. And I’ve become fascinated by COLORSxSTUDIOS as a digital destination for new music that has succeeded wildly in a business space that is fraught and unfriendly to emerging talent.
What is COLORSxSTUDIOS?
COLORSxSTUDIOS is a global music brand and creative platform that bridges the gaps between culture, art, and fashion. Since starting in 2016, it has become the most watched live performance show on YouTube, harking back to the days of watching music videos for entertainment. In today’s cloud-based entertainment world, COLORSxSTUDIOS has become a digital destination for users, artists, and the music industry alike, prescribing musical trends and serving as both a launch platform for emerging artists and a must-do venue for more established artists.
Characterized by colorful backdrops that match the overall vibe and aesthetic of each artist, COLORSxSTUDIOS is a platform where artists from around the world can display their musical talent, providing viewers with the intimate sense of watching a live performance. There’s generally just an artist and a mic in front of a simple backdrop. No distractions. While the format of recorded live performances on YouTube is not new, COLORSxSTUDIOS has proven to be the most popular. In the YouTube channel’s four years, they’ve amassed over 1.6B total views and close to 5M subscribers, accumulating more followers on YouTube than similar live performance channels like Boiler Room (2.5M), and BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge (2.1M).
The most comparable channel is NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert (5M), which features established artists performing 3-5 songs per episode. Unlike the single song format of COLORSxSTUDIOS, Tiny Desk is intended to mimic a real-life concert-like experience in which you attend because you already know the artist, vs COLORSxSTUDIOS, where the intention is to showcase new artists. For Tiny Desk, the focus of discovery is on the individual song while for COLORSxSTUDIOS it’s the individual artist.
In this post, I’ll explore how COLORSxSTUDIOS has become such a highly influential music brand, especially in an industry that has traditionally focused on the quantity vs quality of consumption and where there is often a lack of emotional connection between the brand and the audience.
“All Colors, No Genres”: Why It Works
Since its inception, COLORSxSTUDIOS has remained true to their brand and mission in their curation and discovery of new artists. Scroll through the videos: you’ll see artists from a diverse range of scenes, styles, and genres, each with a unique sound. Other listening platforms try to categorize an artist into a particular genre, then rely on algorithms that leverage signals like similar listening behaviors and regionality to surface similar content. But COLORSxSTUDIOS has a fundamental belief that good music and more broadly, artistry and its impact on culture should be readily visible, not relegated to the filter bubbles that commonly pervade the recommendation engines of most listening platforms, where discovery happens only when an artist is already fairly well established.
Today, independent artists have a hard time breaking through and making a living from their work. Major platforms are incentivized to showcase prominent artists: in 2013 the top 1% accounted for 84% of all streaming and subscription revenue.
In contrast, COLORSxSTUDIOS has featured more than 400 artists, of whom more than 75% are independent, enabling these small-scale artists to build their presence and push against the algorithmic musical trends.
Some of the claim-to-fame artists whom COLORSxSTUDIOS featured early include the likes of Billie Eilish, Sho Madjozi, and Rema. According to a TIME magazine interview with co-founder Philipp Starcke, “Billie Eilish was just 15 years old and had just 35,000 subscribers on YouTube when she showed up in August 2017 to perform ‘watch.’ Nobody knew her. She came in with her parents, and it was obvious that she was an incredible talent.”
South African artist Sho Madjozi went on COLORSxSTUDIOS to share her unreleased single “John Cena” back in 2019. After releasing online, the video was retweeted by Missy Elliot and shared across the world, becoming the number one trending video on YouTube, and reaching 3M views in less than a month. Sho then made an appearance on The Ellen Show and got to perform in front of John Cena himself. Similarly, since Rema, a Nigerian artist, performed on COLORSxSTUDIOS, he generated millions of views in Brazil across all of his releases, another example of how music careers are accelerated across borders. Following his two performances, he signed with Apple Music’s “Up Next” talent program.
The large digital streaming platforms (DSPs) now look to COLORSxSTUDIOS as a source of talent as well as a cultural tastemaker. In fact, not only does COLORSxSTUDIOS release all of their original recordings on these DSPs but they’ve also fully embraced the curatorial role, creating their own official curator profile where they feature guests to curate playlists based on moods.
Listen to Jade when you’re looking for something smooth and chill, Ruby for bangers and party starters, and Amber for all-things funk. The idea is that you go to COLORSxSTUDIOS to discover what’s new, take the initial lean-forward action of pressing play, and then lean back into the catalog.
While each artist that COLORSxSTUDIOS promotes is unique in their talent and individuality, collectively they share a common thread: diversity. Artists of color are a regular feature on the channel, bringing their talents to sounds like hip-hop, soul, and R&B. COLORSxSTUDIOS celebrates diversity in music and people, regardless of genre, language, gender, or geography. Like they say, all colors, no genres.
COLORSxSTUDIOS is great at not only finding artists but also capturing those artists in the moment. Each artist performs in the same empty, blank studio room in Berlin, so COLORSxSTUDIOS is able to control the quality of production while giving the artist the space to be vulnerable and let their personality shine through their performance—as well as their fashion tastes. As a viewer, you’re exposed to both unique sounds and visual inspiration from the artists’ international fashion styles.
Tying the performances together is the backdrop—walls that are colored in to match the overall vibe or aesthetic of the artist. I don’t know what goes through the art team’s mind when they choose their colors but their choices consistently elicit a mood that goes hand in hand with the lyrics, the fashion, and the performance. I’d argue that the visual component of COLORSxSTUDIOS videos enhances the compelling immersive, emotional experience, emphasizing the COLORSxSTUDIOS conviction that music shouldn't be defined by a particular genre but rather by how it makes you feel. Again, all colors, no genres.
The COLORSxSTUDIOS Value Proposition
COLORSxSTUDIOS has built out a brand that’s trusted by both artists and viewers, thus establishing a unique flywheel in which their creative and curation quality leads to the discovery and promotion of emerging artists. The subsequent success of some of these artists continues to elevate the COLORSxSTUDIOS brand as a groundbreaking element of an artist’s career; this in turn leads other artists to request to be featured, feeding the discovery of new talent.
Now artists—both emerging and established—all want to perform on COLORSxSTUDIOS, not only because of its promotional power but also because being selected to perform sends a signal about the artist’s quality. COLORSxSTUDIOS has built trust with the talent, as well, so artists who have benefited from the platform want to come back and perform again, elevating the prestige and authenticity of the very platform that took the first chance on them. COLORSxSTUDIOS is now a must-do for all artists, no matter what the genre, a digital destination on their physical tour of media appearances.
COLORSxSTUDIOS has also transferred the brand and loyalty to other products, including commerce and community experiences. On the commerce front, COLORSxSTUDIOS launched their own direct-to-consumer store, selling their own branded apparel; more interestingly, they launched a pair of headphones that were the exact same ones used by the artists featured in their videos. On the community experiences front, COLORSxSTUDIOS hosts pop-ups and concerts as a way to connect artists with fans and their communities, a physical extension of their digital platform. What’s unique about their concerts is that they tap into their international network of artists to schedule back-to-back sets. So unlike traditional concerts, where you go to a venue to see a specific artist or go to a festival to listen to a specific genre of music, with COLORSxSTUDIOS, you go because of the brand, trusting that you’ll discover great new music that you wouldn’t have heard otherwise.
More interesting is the community that inhabits their live chat (to the right of their video player), where you’ll find people from all around the globe connecting over music, people staying up until 1am in Seoul, while people in LA are getting up extra early to watch premieres. All of them have two things in common: COLORSxSTUDIOS and a consistently positive attitude.
Whether digital or in person, COLORSxSTUDIOS has become the stage for music discovery, creativity, and cultural expression. Their technique of presenting artists and bands through colors and not genres is fresh and countercultural in a society where products and consumers are constantly being defined and put into categories. It is a chance for artists and bands to express themselves on a platform that focuses on their creativity and talent, empowering and inviting the world to become a more creative place through music. Garnering millions of views on their videos, the innovative platform has embraced the globalization of music while creating one of the most visually recognizable music platforms on YouTube.
While Mahalia was unknown to me at the time, I did end up going to her concert in Brooklyn and have been converted into a Mahalia fan, like the 40M other people that were given the chance to experience her talent and creativity online.
More importantly, I’ve become a COLORSxSTUDIOS fanboy. Sure, you’ll find me deep down the COLORSxSTUDIOS rabbit hole plenty of evenings, vibing with the music. But at a business level, I’m starstruck by the way that COLORSxSTUDIOS is meeting the needs of the artists, the audiences, AND the music industry — providing artists with the infrastructure to build independent careers, creating a trusted brand for which audiences can develop an emotional connection, and fostering a more diverse and global music ecosystem for all to enjoy.
All Colors, No Genres.
Some of my personal favorites: