Future Stars: Rudy Mancuso (Shots Studios)

Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe.

Rudy Mancuso was one of the biggest stars on Vine, with over 10 million followers. Now, like most of the deceased app’s alumni, he’s found a new home on YouTube. Unlike Bazzi, the Vine star signed to Atlantic and currently having a hit with Mine, Rudy has put his career in the hands of a company that doesn’t specialise in music, but in managing influencers. Shots Studios started out as a Snapchat-esque app, and now functions as management, record label and MCN for its talent. If major label artists think a 360 deal is cheeky, they should spare a thought for the social media stars, expected to sign their lives away to one company. So far Rudy has toured with Justin Bieber (an investor in Shots) and released two singles. His latest, Magic, is a duet with his actress girlfriend Maia Mitchell (from Disney’s Teen Beach Movie). In a bid to keep happy both Rudy’s YouTube fanbase and the starmakers at Spotify, he released two music videos – a traditional horizontal video for YouTube and a vertical one for Spotify. The ploy worked – the track was in sixth place on last week’s New Music Friday US, and reached no.3 on the YouTube trending chart, with a million views in its first day online.

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