Vlogger Scotty Sire Isn't Transforming Himself — He's 'Reinventing the Career Path I'm Going Down' (2024)

• Entertainment
• Music

Vlogger Scotty Sire still remembers the music that filled his childhood home, music that would run the gamut from crooner Roger Miller to rapper Busta Rhymes to pop princess Britney Spears, music that would be turned up loud once the sun went down, music that made him feel something in his soul.

And it's that sort of music the Californian now wants to bring to the world.

Granted, Sire never dreamed of being a musician per se. Initially, he made a name for himself on the once-popular social media app Vine, where he did "the whole six-second thing," changing the lyrics to recognizable songs to make them somewhat unrecognizable.

"Eventually, one of my friends was like, 'Come do this YouTube video with me and let's try to make a song in 60 minutes," Sire, 29, says with a laugh during an interview with PEOPLE. "It was just for fun. We were goofing off. But from then on, I just kept on making them and they were all goofy YouTube songs until eventually, I realized it would be cool to try and do this more seriously because I do really enjoy it."

Soon, Sire took it on himself to start seriously promoting the music he was sharing over various social media channels, encouraging many of his famous vlogger friends to post about the songs and such. And in doing so, Sire started getting a whole lot more confidence about the overall sound of his voice. In fact, everyone was loving it.

Well, everyone but his girlfriend Jac Anderson.

"If I'm goofing off singing around the house, usually my girlfriend is like, 'Will you stop?'" Sire says with a laugh. "When I do shows and stuff like that, I don't think that I am someone like an Ariana Grande or an Adele with this big, beautiful voice. It's more about the performance and the energy that I bring to the shows and stuff like that. It's good, but it's not spectacular."

In fact, it was good enough for Sire to snag a record deal with that voice of his, resulting in "MOOD SWINGS," Sire's first release of 2021 with indie rock label Fearless Records. Essentially, the alternative-pop dance song focuses in on that roller coaster of emotions we all face daily.

"Right now I'm trying to steer away from everything being about how I'm feeling sad or mad or how I'm feeling happy, but that's what's going on in my head all the time," says Sire, who completed his full album project back in 2018 and has garnered more than 135 million Spotify streams to date.

"When I was writing ('MOOD SWINGS') I was thinking about how you can go from feeling really good in one moment and then really bad in the next moment. The whole idea is that these feelings are all fleeting. You're not going to feel happy all the time. You're not going to feel sad all the time. And when I was thinking about that, that's when I thought, 'I should write a song about this.'"

Of course, throughout the entire writing process, Sire says he keeps his over 11 million followers in mind.

"I think about them the entire time," he stresses. "I'm always thinking about what the audience that follows me for my YouTube videos is going to like and what they are not going to like, but I also think about what a more mainstream crowd is going to like."

It's that mainstream crowd that Sire has been increasingly seeing while out on tour, with Sire's What's Going On 30-city tour grossing nearly $1 million in box office and VIP revenues in 2019.

"I've had people come up to me at meet and greets and say something like, 'Yeah, I don't even watch your videos — I just like really enjoyed your music, so I had to come and see a show,' and that just blew me away," says Sire, who is currently putting together a new tour for next year. "I was like, 'Whoa, really? That's awesome.' I thought everyone just came because they knew me from YouTube, but you actually just listened to the music. That's it. That's what I want."

But make no mistake — the guy who continues to tread between YouTube creator to business owner to musician claims that he isn't looking to completely re-invent himself.

"I'm simply reinventing the career path that I'm going down," says Sire, who admits to not posting as many YouTube videos as of late. "Instead of being the daily content creator of whatever, I'm spending time on projects that I'm putting my time and passion into — writing the songs and making sure they're perfect and working on music videos and making sure that they're perfect instead of just throwing stuff together and putting it out and hoping people just like it."

The music simply remains just another piece of who Scotty Sire is.

"It's all about trying to find like a balance between music and social media," he says. "I'm not going to jump all in and be like, 'I'm done with everything else' until I know that it's solid. All I know is that music is one of the most important things in the world."