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Live Local Music

Cimorelli: The Next YouTube Sensation

Posted by Karen Marchuska on 05/28 at 01:26 PM

We all know the story of Justin Bieber’s rise to fame by being discovered on YouTube, but six sisters from California are taking it to a whole new level through their covers.  Cimorelli - comprised of Christina (21), Katherine (19), Lisa (17), Amy (16), Lauren (13), and Dani (11), has over 650,000 subscribers to its YouTube channel, is currently working on a full-length album, and just won Ryan Seacrest’s“Bieber-Off” contest that was hosted on his website.  And to think it all started with one Miley Cyrus song.

In 2009, the then five-member group (Dani was too young at the time) recorded an acapella cover of Miley Cyrus’s just released song, “Party in the USA,” on the night she was performing it at the Teen Choice Awards.  This was no accident - the girls even put “Teen Choice Awards” in the title of their video to grab more hits.  But still, they didn’t think that those words would get them over 20,000 views overnight.  It turned out that oceanUP, a teen, up-and-coming celebrity gossip site, had posted the cover on their website and sent a bunch of tweens to the video.  One of those tweens happened to be a British middle-schooler with a mother in music management, who quickly got the girl-group signed to Universal Records.  Coincidentally, they are signed under the division Island Def Jam, which is also who Bieber is signed with.  Though this cover was their first, it remains one of the most popular with over 5.5 million views.

Since then, they have been busy honing their melodic skills and cranking out covers of every pop song to grace the charts.  They have become pros at picking popular songs that will attract viewers. Their most watched video to date, with over 11.5 million views, is a cover of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.”  They posted it in December of last year, months before it even made it to American radio waves.  The girls have also been busy collaborating with other YouTube artists like, Ryan Beatty and Matty B.

After gaining so much attention on their covers, they have started to use programs like GarageBand and Logic Pro to record, mix, and edit vocals before making their videos, as opposed to just setting up a camera and recording acoustic or acapella versions.  This allows them to make higher quality videos that have more of a polished music video look.  Despite the use of higher-end production, they insist that their self-made harmonies will never go away.  Their mother, a classically trained pianist, taught them all to harmonize at a very young age.  “It was an experiment,” Christina says, “to see if we could learn.”  After that, it was no looking back and they started harmonizing everywhere.  Even in these highly edited videos, it’s really cool to still hear the harmonies, and it definitely sets them apart from other up and coming artists.

The girls recently gained national attention with their “Boyfriend” cover for Ryan Seacrest’s “Bieber-Off,” where they got almost 30,000 votes, while the closest competitor had around 10,000.  It seems like they are following in the Biebs’s footsteps by being discovered on YouTube, but as his first covers didn’t become popular until after he did, these girls are already ahead of the curve.  They currently have an EP out titled “The CimFam EP,” consisting of five covers and one original, and are in the process of recording their first full-length album of all original songs.  You can find Cimorelli on their official website, Twitter, Facebook, and of course YouTube.