Streaming videos on social media platforms are offering members of the public the chance to stand out as online celebrities. Among them is Fabricio Di Paolo, a piano player from Brazil.[Photo provided to China Daily]

A career on the internet

The Most Beautiful Night of 2019 lasted for three hours and its videos were uploaded online, receiving nearly 90 million hits. The gala was also a celebration of Bilibili's 10th anniversary and the audience members were selected from its users.

One user commented on the platform that there are many people with great skills and it is the video-sharing platforms that give them the chance to stand out on stage. Another netizen named Liu Shushu attended the gala and commented on the platform that she never imagined seeing her idol perform on stage in front of her.

Other stars included Meng Xiaojie, a flute player with 300,000 followers who teaches at Harbin Conservatory of Music, and a singer known as Feizao Jun (which means "soap bacteria") who has nearly 550,000 followers on the platform. Most of them started to release videos on Bilibili over two years ago.

Chen Leyi, a singer who was born in 2000 in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, is one of them.

"I've loved singing and dancing since I was a little girl and always dreamed of having my own concert," recalls Chen, a vocal music performance major student at the Zhejiang Vocational Academy of Art. She also loves Japanese cartoons and met many friends who share the same passion through QQ and other forums such as Baidu Tieba and acgbbs.net.

In 2014, Chen created her Bilibili account. She has watched many animated dance videos on the platform and practiced them at home. On Feb 14, 2017, she uploaded her first dance video Ranshang Nide Yanse ("I was painted with your color"), an animated romantic dance from Japan. The video quickly gained over 10,000 hits. With the dance, the high school student gained her first 1,000 followers on the platform.

"It was a great encouragement because I never expected to attract so many followers just because of one dance," she says.

Since then, she has been regularly uploading videos every month. Chen also started to release her singing videos over two years ago. She chose vocal music performance as her major to enhance her skills, and her following on Bilibili has now grown to over 479,000. Her 70 videos have gained 6.5 million views.

In June 2019, Chen was invited to sing at a Shanghai concert organized by Bilibili every year since 2013 to gather fans of "animation, comic and games", or ACG, together.

"There were over 10,000 people in the audience. To try and make my performance more interactive, I spent days choosing the song, aLIEz, from the Japanese cartoon Aldnoah Zero, which is really popular," says Chen. "I was excited to have people sing along with me at my debut show. It felt like a dream come true."