Chilled music idea became a global winner

KLUED UP: Yellow Brick Cinema founder Roché Klue and marketing manager Shaun Williams with their YouTube Gold Play Button, awarded for reaching a million subscribers THREE years ago, Roché Klue spent his last R1 000 on a keyboard, borrowed his dad’s computer and started posting self-composed meditation music videos on YouTube.

It doesn’t sound like much of a business plan, and Klue admits that initially it wasn’t particularly successful. “But something told me to carry on,” he said.

His determination paid off last week when his YouTube channel, Yellow Brick Cinema, scooped two of YouTube’s inaugural subSaharan Africa awards and a Gold Play Button for reaching a million subscribers.

Klue’s rags-to-riches story is straight out of the Steve Jobs/Mark Shuttleworth playbook.

Starting from his Johannesburg bedroom he’s built a world-leading brand with customers in more than 150 countries. And created South Africa’s biggest YouTube channel.

“A lot of people were shocked to see us win, including ourselves,” Klue, 32, told the Sunday Times this week from his office in Fourways.

But the biggest thrill, he said, was “knowing that you’re touching so many millions of people all over the world”.

Hundreds of testimonials arrive every week from people who have found comfort in Klue’s relaxing music tailored for insomnia, yoga, study, work, stress relief or even healing.

Listen to one of Yellow Brick’s 10 iTunes albums or its 1 400-plus YouTube videos and you might wonder what the fuss is about; some seem to amount to eight hours of nothing but morphing chords punctuated with raindrops.

But the music’s therapeutic qualities are underpinned by science, specifically binaural beats, which Klue described as “a form of auditory illusion”.

Klue’s burgeoning empire is now backed by state-of-the-art equipment, world-class sound libraries, seven full-time staff members and a team of freelance South African composers.

He plans to enter the music streaming business and to source or create “beautiful video” to accompany his music, rather than still images.

“A lot of YouTube channels put a few videos up and think magic is going to happen, but it doesn’t work that way,” said Klue, who studied contemporary music at the National School of the Arts in Braamfontein. “We are constantly look for gaps in what we’re doing and ways to improve, and we take the comments from listeners to heart.”