They had more than four million YouTube subscribers – so why did TwoSet delete 1400 videos?

TwoSet Violin are deadset legends at my place. Once a week, my husband or I suggest our daughter attempt a “Ling Ling challenge”. And to the child who just asked for the Nintendo we usually reply: “Go practise!”

If TwoSet are on your radar because you’re trying to encourage a child to learn the violin, you’ll no doubt recognise the musical comedy duo’s catchphrase as well as their fictional take on the tiger parent’s ideal child, Ling Ling, who practises for 40 hours a day, plays the hardest pieces flawlessly and won violin competitions while still in the womb.

When I speak to TwoSet – aka Australian-Taiwanese 30-somethings Brett Yang and Eddy Chen over Zoom – they are at home in Singapore nearing the end of a world tour, Sacrilegious Games (which comes to the Sydney Opera House in June). Eddy looks around his home office/music room and laments its size: “The dream musician office would have like the grand piano, even though I’m not a pianist, you know, just having it there for the display … that’s the thing with Singapore, though. Space is very limited compared to Brisbane.”

Brisbane is where Yang and Chen first met, in 2006 – at after-school maths tutoring, aged 14 and 13, respectively – and where they launched the duo that has carved out a large space online in classical music. Since 2013, they have done for the genre what fellow violinist Nigel Kennedy did before YouTube, with his version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, recorded 40 years ago. (On its release in September 1989, EMI used pop strategies to catapult sales that landed it in the Guinness Book of World Records, with more than 3 million copies sold.)

TwoSet rocked YouTube – and since 2021, TikTok too. Initially recording violin covers of pop music, they then parodied the competitive world they knew well, attracting millions of subscribers and the interest of such soloists as Hilary Hahn, Ray Chen and Chloe Chua. A world tour in 2017 brought roars of laughter from lounge rooms to concert halls.

Then, after garnering 4.38 million subscribers, they pulled the plug, wiping 1400 or more videos from their digital footprint in October 2024 to leave only 29 of their “creme de la creme” online.

Fans were aghast. The pair had their reasons, and later said they’d burnt out too.

“Musician burnout is a very common thing,” Chen says. “You see it in uni when a lot of us are in this hyper-competitive environment; international competitions, orchestra auditions where a hundred people go for one job, practising three, four, five hours a day.

“I guess it just never clocked to us that the same thing can happen on social media … You’re having to post five videos a week and all that.”

While TwoSet have since restored public access to their videos and created many more, time out allowed them to re-evaluate themselves and their work. Chen says he realised: “My worth as a human being is not determined by whether I can play the Sibelius concerto or not … My worth as a person in this society is not how many views I can get for a YouTube channel.”

They cut production to one or two videos a week, from five at their peak, and now try not to lose sight of why they are doing it. Which is perhaps best revealed in their tour.

“The concept of Sacrilegious Games came from one of our biggest viral videos from a while back where there’s a violinist that claimed to be the fastest violinist in the world [and turned it] into like a media PR stunt,” Chen says. “He played very fast, but he wasn’t really playing the violin. I think he knew that – it was just a PR stunt – but it was effective. It got views.

“So Sacrilegious Games became this proxy term for, in some ways, doing something a little bit disingenuous, or not good, for the sake of publicity and views. It’s this constant tension for every artist and every creator to balance making something that feels genuine versus making something that you feel will get views.”

Producing 90 minutes of compelling concert material demanded a new approach. “The question was always: ‘How do we turn a 10-minute YouTube video into a one-hour-plus live experience?’” Chen says.

They could have looked to symphonic form as a way of generating material but turned mainly to the movies – scripts, narrative arcs, the journeys characters take. “There’s always some kind of thematic debate,” Chen says. “One of the themes that personally feels very close to us, and we understand a lot, is what it’s like being a classical musician in today’s world. That theme ultimately becomes: how do you choose between views [clicks] and sacrilegiousness on one extreme end of the spectrum – pure entertainment, Hollywood baby, whatever – versus being authentic, being an artist, being true to yourself, creating a respectable, valuable art form that you’re genuinely passionate about?”

There’s even a plot twist, Yang adds. “And I think the goal was actually so the people that come – the fans that come, anyone for that matter – will leave wanting to discover more of the classical music world … We want everyone that comes to generally leave with something – ‘I want to practise tomorrow’, ‘I want to pick up an instrument’ or ‘I want to go to a classical concert and give it a chance’.”

They say a show of hands at the concerts has revealed about 30 per cent of their audience are first-timers. “Except for Vienna,” Yang says. “Everyone’s been to a concert there!”

Which begs a question. “Waltz king” Andre Rieu has about 6.84 million YouTube subscribers. Would TwoSet join him online, and turbocharge their base in one swoop?

“We actually have reached out to Andre on this,” says Yang. “I think we’ve actually been to one of his concerts … but he wasn’t so keen on the video because I think the nature of what we do is very different to him.”

TwoSet Violin perform at Riverside Theatre, Perth on June 7, the Sydney Opera House on June 9 and 10, the Palais Theatre, Melbourne on June 19, Brisbane Convention Centre on June 21 and Adelaide Festival Theatre on June 24.