By now, most people are familiar with YouTube song covers. Whether you subscribe to your favorite singer or accidentally watched a cover when searching for the original song, you've probably seen a video of someone earnestly singing a popular song against a plain background, with or without a guitar. That's not what Luke Conard does.
Yes, Luke covers popular songs, but his videos contain much more than a guitar. His videos are full music videos. Luke doesn't just sing the latest Bruno Mars song, he creates an entire music video to go with it —and often, they rival the original.
The extra effort hasn't been wasted. Luke has over 460,000 YouTube subscribers and his most popular videos have millions of views. His fans have also carried over to his social media accounts. He has over 200,000 followers on both Twitter and Instagram, where many of his posts relate to his YouTube videos.
Luke may not have the biggest fan base yet, but he's already put his online notoriety to use. His original album, Summer Love , was released in September and is available on iTunes. He's also made music videos to go with his own songs, but they aren't quite as popular as his cover videos — at least not yet.
For now, here's his most popular video, a cover of Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" with over 5 million views.
The official-seeming video helps it stand out from YouTube's mass of covers, and of course Luke's talent can't hurt. Below is his most recent video, a cover of One Direction's "Story Of My Life," featuring another famous YouTuber (and Liam Hemsworth lookalike), Joey Graceffa, who has appeared in many of Luke's videos.
In just four weeks, it's gotten over 420,000 views. Comparatively, the video below, for the title track of his original album, only has 286,000 views. It's a number that many aspiring singers would envy, but for Luke, nothing special.
But Luke is gaining new fans every day and for every cover he posts, more people are discovering his original music. It's only a matter of time before his own songs begin to overshadow his covers, no matter how how great the music videos are.
Image: lukeconard/Instagram
