They made D4vd a star. Now they want to convict him of murder

“He was posting every day, playing every day, and he was doing his best to get somewhere,” says a 21-year-old New York-based gamer who goes by the username Sacred WTF. “Bro, sometimes I would wake up to multiple posts from him. He was just trying to get out, and just get one good video out.”

By 2021, D4vd was 16 years old and had already built a brand as a socially awkward outcast who spent almost all of his time online. (This helped with his homeschooling.) And sometimes, it paid off: when he started catering to YouTube’s algorithm by adding popular songs to his channel. fortnite The videos had hundreds of thousands of views and made “a lot of money” from advertising revenue, as musician Benny Blanco later told in an interview. But these massive views also brought copyright strikes and warnings from YouTube, paid by record labels, to remove songs or risk being kicked off the platform. That’s when, according to the legendary origin story relayed in the press by D4vd, his mother had a life-changing suggestion: Why didn’t her son make his own damn music?

Using his iPhone, a pair of earbuds, and a mobile app called Bandlab, D4vd — he adopted the moniker around this time, in part for search engine optimization — huddled in his sister’s closet and recorded himself freestyle to a royalty-free piano beat he found on YouTube. He uploaded the track called “Run Away” to Soundcloud in December 2021 and tagged it with the keywords that helped it go viral: #emo #chill #lowfi #slowedandreverb #blowthisup #foryoupage.

But it wasn’t until July 2022, when he himself released the song “Romantic Murder,” that the 17-year-old really exploded. Two months later, D4vd signed a deal with Interscope Records’ Darkroom imprint. The comparisons to Billie Eilish, who also struck a deal with Darkroom as a teenager after uploading tracks to Soundcloud, were immediate. In magazine profiles, D4vd was heralded as a new kind of genius: a sheltered gamer who accidentally became a pop star, seemingly overnight. GQ called him “the mouthpiece of Gen Z heartache.” The NME declared that he was a “multi-genre visionary”. Billboard named D4vd “one of alternative music’s most promising new artists.”

“When I found him, it was like, ‘Wow, he made this in his closet on headphones, on Bandlab,’” says Ykare, a popular TikTokker who dreamed of collaborating with D4vd. This is very cool. I can do that too.” “That was all. This was his claim to fame. “I think that’s what brought in a lot of younger audiences.”

Before Ykare found his niche — dressing as a Teletubby and singing in the shower — he was inspired by D4vd’s humble beginnings. “People were looking forward to it,” Ykare says, because of D4vd’s huge breakthrough from a “homemade niche of, ‘I made this in my bedroom.’ That’s where D4vd lived, and was most successful at doing it.”

D4vd communicated with his young fans through Discord. His server was created by a fan named Moji around the time he signed his record deal. Although not officially associated with Darkroom, Discord had a clear benefit for the label: it was a way to promote releases, tour dates, and merchandise directly to superfans. The moderators, who were mostly other fans but also included at least one member of D4vd’s admin team, Mogul Vision, and sometimes D4vd itself, shared links to new content and encouraged members to sign up for D4vd’s email list to receive pre-sale ticket codes. (Neither Mogul Vision, Darkroom, Interscope Geffen A&M Records nor its parent company Universal Music Group responded to a request for comment.) The tactics also reinforced D4vd’s perceived authenticity as a chronically online teenager without much media training.