LEO MORACHIOLLI

SUBSCRIBERS: 1.5 MILLION

VIDEO VIEWS: 277 MILLION

Leo Morachiolli’s path to YouTube fame was shorter and more straightforward than that of Huang and Kawehi. It’s taken him only three years to amass his impressive audience, once again, largely under the radar of the mainstream press. Before YouTube fame hit, Morachiolla was very much like millions of other aspiring musicians around the world. Born in Norway in 1978 to an Italian father and a Norwegian mother, he started playing guitar and singing at age 15, played in bands, one of which had a record contract with a small Norwegian label.

However, Morachiolla concedes, “unless you’re really big, you can’t make money from music in Norway, so I ended up having to do nine to five jobs. For years I worked mostly in kindergartens and did music as a hobby. But when we moved to Oltedal (a small town in south-west Norway) in 2011, I quit my job and built a studio just outside our house, called Frog Leap Studios, and recorded local bands there. Also, after having played in metal bands for years, I had gotten tired of that, and I started