Nothing ‘Pitiful’ about Loop singer's online success
Video for Mr. Pitiful's "Tired."
(Courtesy)
They call him Mr. Pitiful, and he’s more popular than R. Kelly, Radiohead and Madonna. But it’s OK if you’ve never heard of him.
In less than two years, the 27-year-old South Loop singer-songwriter — real name, Scott Monaghan; stage name, Mr. Pitiful — has amassed more than 20,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. He now ranks in the top 40 most popular musicians on the video-sharing Web site, well ahead of many mainstream pop artists.
All that for a bunch of homemade music videos, most of which simply feature Monaghan singing his blues-infused songs alone in his bedroom with a guitar.
“It’s great, but from a perspective of a [record] label it’s not as great as having a fan base where I can go and fill up an arena with thousands of people,” said Monaghan, who has a day job as an independent Web designer. “I have thousands of fans, but they’re so spread out over the world that anywhere I go there’d only be five or 10 people that would know who I was.”
Those handfuls of fans here and there, however, have put their money where their eyes and ears are. Last year, Monaghan raised almost $10,000 in donations from his YouTube fans so he could produce a five-song CD, now for sale on iTunes. The album is titled: “Doin the Best I Can.”
One fan donated to Monaghan’s CD project after stumbling across a Mr. Pitiful video while browsing for new music on YouTube. Kevin Kewney owns a publishing company in Quincy — he even printed the jackets for Monaghan’s CD.
“His uniqueness really caught my eye,” Kewney said about why he chose to contribute. “He’s kind of got that throwback sound, maybe like an equivalent to a male version of Amy Winehouse.”
Monaghan said he was able to develop such a large Internet following by aggressively promoting his music in the early days of YouTube, which debuted in December 2005.
“I would go to other musicians’ YouTube channels and look at people subscribing to them, and I would send them messages saying, ‘Hey, check out my music,’” Monaghan said. “At its peak, I was sending out more than 1,000 messages at a time. YouTube doesn’t really allow that anymore. That’s one of the reasons it was able to work for me, because YouTube was really like a Wild West place where you could do anything that you wanted to.”
Monaghan might never have uploaded a video onto YouTube if he’d been able to find a band to perform with in Chicago. Originally from Massachusetts, Monaghan moved to the South Loop in late 2005 so his wife could attend graduate school and be closer to her family. After spending several months scouring ads for potential band mates, he decided to become his own one-man band online.
A few of Monaghan’s earliest YouTube videos featured himself performing at a New York nightclub with his band from college at the University of Massachusetts. But Monaghan sings solo into a camcorder in most of his subsequent videos, including his most popular, “Roland’s Song,” which has been viewed almost 220,000 times.
But Monaghan has struggled to book live shows in Chicago because most of the musicians he’s approached about performing with him want to be, of course, paid —something that, at this point, he can’t afford to do.
“I don’t have any Chicago gigs planned now,” Monaghan said. “I’ve talked to a few people about trying to put a band together, but ... my music has lots of parts to it, so to perform live I would need a lot of people onstage.”
Donations for the concert fund, anyone?
Whitney McFerron is a local freelance writer.