This article may be written from a fan's point of view, rather than a neutral point of view. (November 2023) |
AkStar | ||||||||||
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Personal information | ||||||||||
Born | Pavel Andreyevich Aksenov September 2, 2002 Chita, Zabaykalsky Krai, Russia | |||||||||
Origin | Russia | |||||||||
Occupation(s) | Musician, blogger, guitarist | |||||||||
YouTube information | ||||||||||
Channel | ||||||||||
Created by | Pavel Aksenov | |||||||||
Location | St. Petersburg, Russia | |||||||||
Years active | 2014–present | |||||||||
Genre(s) | Music and entertainment content | |||||||||
Subscribers | 3.4 million[1] (August 2023) | |||||||||
Total views | 456 million[1] (August 2023) | |||||||||
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Pavel Andreyevich Aksenov (Russian: Павел Андреевич Аксенов, born September 2, 2002, Chita, Zabaykalsky Krai, Russia[2]), more under the stage name AkStar is a Russian blogger, musician, guitarist.[3][4]
He was born on September 2, 2002 in Chita.[5] Then his mother was given a guitar and he decided to try to play it.[6] When he saw a video on YouTube with Korean guitarist Sungha Jung, he was inspired by it and decided to try to do the same and record videos.[7] At the age of 8, he persuaded his mom to put him in music school, but his mom discouraged him in every possible way.[8]
But finally, he persuaded her and his mom put him in a local music school.[9] Then for the first time he participated in a local music competition, where he won and took 1st place.[4][10] At the age of 12, he started a YouTube channel called Aks Guit, where he began recording cover songs.[11] At the age of 13, my parents moved from Chita to St. Petersburg to go to a better music school and continue their development.[12]
At the age of 14, he entered the Rimsky Korsakov School of Music in St. Petersburg. From the age of 9 to 14, he participated in 15 international and All-Russian competitions, where he took 1st and 2nd places in many of them.[13]
At the same time, he was recording covers and guitar lessons for his YouTube channel. In 2017, right on Pavel birthday, one of his videos started gaining momentum in views, racking up over a million views in a matter of weeks.[14] After that, he decided to pay more attention to the channel and started recording more picks of 5 popular releases.[2]
And in 2018, he renamed the channel to AkStar. In 2020, he entered the Mussorgsky music school, but in the same year, he decided to quit his studies to devote more time to creativity.[15] In June 2020, he launched the column "Guitarist pretends to be a beginner at guitar lessons", which dramatically gained momentum and became the most popular column of the channel.[16]
Then the rubric became popular not only on his channel, but also spread all over the internet and became popular on Youtube and everyone started making similar videos.[17] After that, the channel has steadily gained momentum, gaining a large audience. Cumulatively, the total number of views has reached over 100 million. In just 3 weeks, over a million people subscribed to it.[18]
Then he was awarded the "Discovery of the Year" award in the field of music. In 2022, he adapted a previous column, but using a baby mask. Such videos quickly gained momentum and at the time of 2023, there are more than 10 million views on such videos.[19]
His channel developed and flourished until 2019. Then the musician's account was hacked. On the same day, Pavel received several messages from his dad's page "VKontakte".[20] An anonymous user admitted that it was he who hacked the account. He offered Pavel to ransom the page for an amount of money, but Aksyonov refused. The hacker fulfilled his promise – he deleted all the content from Akstar's channel.[3][21]
Pavel turned to his friend Yarik Bro for help. A day later, the channel was restored, but under the name "Yegor Ponarchuk".[22] Some time later, the account was hacked again.[23] When they again restored the channel, it was called "Southern Sun". During the period of interruptions, several thousand subscribers unsubscribed from Pavel.[24] Bloggers decided to support Pavel and launched a peaceful action with the hashtag "#akstarzhivi". This time Aksenov failed to restore the material that had accumulated on the channel. He had to re-fill the channel with new material. After a while, he renamed the channel and it was called AkStar.[25][26]
On December 22, 2021 Pavel Aksenov opened AkStar guitar online academy. Now the academy has more than 6,000 students.
The blogger had a mixed reputation and criticism against him: some liked the blogger's videos and some did not.[2] Like, for example, in 2020, the analytical company "BloggerBase",[27][28] assigned Aksenov's channel the 5th place among all Russian channels by the number of dislikes.[29][30] Pavel has racked up just under 50,000 dislikes[31][32][33]