Pomplamoose

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Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn; stream music-making on Twitch.

—Twitch followers

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About Pomplamoose

Pomplamoose is the internet’s most joyful musical couple — Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn, husband and wife, multi-instrumentalist mad scientist and powerhouse singer, who turned a bedroom in Northern California into one of the first great independent-music stories of the YouTube era. They proved the internet could be the record label, the studio, and the stage — and then, almost as a side project, Jack went and rebuilt the economics of the whole creator business.

They formed in 2008 in Corte Madera, California. Conte — born July 12, 1984, a Stanford music graduate who’d done voice acting for The Sims 2 — was uploading music videos built on a strict, charming discipline he called “VideoSongs.” Two rules, and they never broke them: what you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing, no miming, every note played live on camera), and if you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds). The result was a split-screen mosaic — a dozen little Jacks playing every instrument in the arrangement, built up layer by layer until the song simply existed. Dawn — the daughter of missionaries who spent her childhood attending Lycées Français in France and Belgium before studying art at Stanford — brought the voice: a warm, expressive alto that could carry a folk ballad or a pop banger with equal ease.

Their first upload, the original song “Hail Mary,” was featured on the YouTube homepage — back when the front page actually moved careers — and the covers followed: Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” each one reimagined with the Pomplamoose treatment. By 2009 they’d sold some 100,000 songs online, direct-to-fan, in an era when that was still close to a miracle. The band’s name, for the record, is a misspelling of the French word pamplemousse — grapefruit. Dawn’s French childhood, in a single word.

The duo’s creative journey, as they tell it, has three phases: the video song (the rules era), the music video (rules thrown out, production amped up, full cinematic ambition), and the company — a real studio with a band’s worth of talented musicians and a video crew, making music and content at a scale the bedroom days could never have supported. Dawn signed with Nonesuch Records in 2012 for her solo debut How I Knew Her, released January 2013, financed by a Kickstarter that raised more than $100,000 from fans — one of the early proof points that the audience was the label now. She’s released four solo albums since, while the duo kept going.

And then there’s the other empire. In May 2013, Conte launched Patreon with co-founder Sam Yam, his old Stanford roommate — born of the same math that drove Pomplamoose. The ad revenue from a viral music video couldn’t come close to repaying the thousands of dollars that video cost to make, but a small subset of the audience would happily pay a few dollars per video, every time. That insight became one of the most influential platforms for creators on earth, and Conte — Patreon’s CEO to this day — built it precisely because he’d lived the problem firsthand. The Pomplamoose story and the Patreon story are the same story: independence isn’t a compromise, it’s the point.

The numbers tell it: more than 2 million YouTube subscribers, over 700 million views, and the 2020 Shorty Award for best YouTube Musician. Conte co-leads the funk outfit Scary Pockets, founded the synth-pop band Magaziine in 2022, and launched the “Digital Spaghetti” YouTube channel in 2023. And in recent years, the two have been streaming music-making live on Twitch — full circle, back to showing exactly how the music gets made, the VideoSongs spirit intact, just live.

Why they matter: before the playbook existed, Pomplamoose wrote it — the independent release, the direct-to-fan money, the personality-driven music video, the proof that you didn’t need the industry if you had the audience and the craft. Why people watch: the joy is real, the musicianship is absurd, the harmonies are pristine, and there’s something deeply satisfying about watching a song get built in front of you, one honest layer at a time. The flowers — sorry, the grapefruit — still deliver.

They were also early to the thing everyone does now: the live show as an extension of the channel. In 2011 they played twenty live dates to sold-out audiences across the US, solving the puzzle every VideoSong raised — how do you perform sixty layers of music with two people? “We just kind of replace the orchestration with fun,” they told an interviewer backstage at Yoshi’s, and it worked, because the songs are strong enough to survive any arrangement and the joy is the whole point.

The legacy keeps compounding. The Spark and Fire documentary series devoted an episode to their creative journey — the starts, the stops, the iterations, the honesty about how personal life and creative life feed each other. Their Patreon page, where Nataly writes the updates herself, has the band working on a French-language record and filming the behind-the-scenes process for fans — the grapefruit going back to its roots. And every “how it’s made” music video on the internet, every split-screen bedroom production, every creator who decided the audience was enough — they all owe Pomplamoose a debt, whether they know it or not.

About this creator

Words by Julian Cole

Pomplamoose is the duo that taught YouTube how to make music videos. Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn — husband and wife, multi-instrumentalists, studio wizards — spent the 2010s building one of the most influential channels in online music, one VideoSong at a time. The concept was the revolution. A VideoSong has one rule: what you…

The concept was the revolution. A VideoSong has one rule: what you see is what you hear. Every sound in the track has to be visible in the video — no hidden layers, no studio trickery the camera doesn't show. Watching them build a song layer by layer, instrument by instrument, was mesmerizing.

The covers were the gateway. Pomplamoose's reinventions — Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, stripped down and rebuilt with ukuleles, horns, and harmonies — racked up hundreds of millions of views and proved that YouTube could be a serious music venue.

Then Jack changed the internet. In 2013 he founded Patreon, the membership platform that became the financial backbone of the entire creator economy. The frustration of making great videos that didn't pay became the company that pays millions of creators. That's a legacy beyond music.

Nataly Dawn's solo career is its own treasure. Albums of witty, jazz-tinged originals that showcase a songwriter's songwriter — the kind of artist other artists study.

The duo's chemistry is the constant. Two virtuosos who genuinely love making things together, filming in their living room with the casual brilliance of people for whom this is just Tuesday.

A decade-plus in, Pomplamoose remains the gold standard for independent musicians online — the proof that you can build a career on craft.

Previously covers Pomplamoose because they wrote the playbook. Press play on any VideoSong and watch a song get built.

The live shows proved it wasn't studio magic. On stage, the duo recreates the VideoSong experience in real time — looping, layering, building songs in front of the audience exactly the way the videos promised.

Previously covers Pomplamoose because craft this good deserves a crowd. One take, no tricks — press play.