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 started learning violin 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.)

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