A junior at AMHS, Eva Leach, has a YouTube channel called “Nathan and Eva” where she posts videos of her and her brother covering popular songs and singing new original songs. The channel has nearly 90,000 subscribers. At 100,000 they will receive a special gold YouTube play button commemorating their hard work and dedication. Even though they have only around 90,000 subscribers  many of their videos have  1,000,000 views. One video that stands out the most is one called “Hero (family of the year)”.  That video has over 17,000,000 views. It went viral over just a few days gaining attention from many national shows such as America’s Got Talent and the Jimmy Kimmel Show.  Eva and her brother declined the offers to be a part of any national attention and stuck to doing their own thing on YouTube. The brother sister duo have a website where you can purchase music called Band Camp (https://nathanleachmusic.bandcamp.com/)  . This site helps them make money for what they love. Down below is a quick interview about the significance of music and YouTube for Eva.

How did you get your start?

“Nathan was the one who originally started the channel his freshman year of college to continue his guitar playing, but every time he came home he would practice and I started singing along with him , so we decided to give a duet a try and we loved doing it together, so we tried to record one every time he was home. We’ve been making the videos together for about 3 or 4 years”

What has been your favorite video?

“ My favorite video would have to be the Drake “One Dance Song,” or our personal favorite song to sing, “Dearly Departed” by Shakey Graves…although “Budapest” was really fun too…”

Have you made money off of it?

“We don’t make money off of the covers since they aren’t our original songs, but we have made a bit of money playing gigs around town, busking on the streets, and a little bit from our bandcamp website where people can buy the songs either for free or for whatever price they want to give us…all of the money we have made goes to either new instruments or sound equipment”

Why did you turn down publicity?

“We turned down the publicity offers because we were both still in school and wanted to finish before we went headfirst into the music industry. Also we wanted to get more experience performing for people before we went big….it was just bad timing I think for producers to contact us and tv shows etc… We didn’t really know who we could trust and how we could cover the expenses of traveling and taking time off too.”

How did that one become so viral?

“Honestly I have no idea why “Hero” went viral, except that it was very sincere and not flashy, which I think people found refreshing I guess??? It originally got started on the San Fransisco Globe website, which then became viral through Facebook. It actually separately went viral in France on a website called Feroce with 18 million views, but they had to take the video down for copyright issues”

Check out her channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/NathanLeachMusic