 What's up everybody? Once again, it's Brandon Shawn and today we're gonna talk about the unorthodox rise of the YouTube star Ricegum and does he have a legitimate rap career? And if you don't know who Ricegum is, let's start here. Now as I currently read this on Spotify, Ricegum has 621,747 monthly listeners and his top song has 31,681,433 listens. It's called Every Night Sist and we'll get a little bit into that later. As you can see, he also has some other songs in the millions. This gives you a snapshot of what Ricegum is doing musically. But let's rewind it for a bit. Ricegum did not start as a rapper or making any kind of music. He didn't even start as a regular type of YouTube star. Ricegum began as a gamer. He dropped his first video on YouTube in 2012 when he was playing Call of Duty. Now it wasn't until three years later in December of 2015 that he had his first truly viral video. It was a video titled These Kids Must Be Stopped. Completely unrelated to gaming, the whole concept was he was talking about some musically stars, some young kids and they were basically doing things to music or musically that he considered to be too grown for 13 year old kids to be doing whether it was sexual, whether just the lyrics were out of their league, there were several different topics. I don't know if you guys heard it. This fucker just said I'll be drunk texting you. I did some research. It's full of 13. He'll be drunk texting. I didn't even text at the age of 13. I think she just said if anyone tried to play you, fuck her best friend or something. Once again, she's 13. If anybody in the comments says if she's 13, I'm 13. You fucking knock it off right now. You knock it off. Yo, miss me with that gay shit? What the fuck? Everyone that's watching right now is probably pissed as fuck because you didn't dodge it. Now this video currently has 14 million views and it actually sparked a period in which rice gum grew 800,000 subscribers in seven months. To prove to you how this was his first truly viral video and how unsuspecting he was of the success that came of it, at the end of the video he says this. I know you enjoyed my reaction, not necessarily all the kids dancing and doing all that stuff, but if you enjoyed the video and want some more, please drop a thumbs up. Let's aim for 3k, 3,000. He got a lot more than 3,000. So now let's just stop right here and talk about the few things that made this thing a success in itself. He was talking about a group that was already big of these musically stars who had a lot of people who were interested in them and if there's any kind of hate thrown at them, then they're definitely gonna go to it. Now on top of that though, he capitalized on it when Jacob Sartorius, who was included in rice gum's video, did a response roasting his ass. Hold up. He tries to roast me. Boy, you legit look like a burned sweet potato with your little crocodile hair. Look like you got pooped out of an alien, boy. Boy. So not only did that give rice gum more attention, but then rice gum actually capitalized off of that by doing a response to the response, taking that energy once again. I'm 19. He's 13, right? So I didn't want to, you know, just roast him back and you know, it looks kind of weird if a 19 year old is kind of bullying a 13 year old and if I made him cry, you could sue me and just all this other stuff. So I just didn't want to do that. So I just made a slideshow. Is where we get the formula of rice gum. That little drama, that controversy but came the formula for how rice gum continuously bill his audience. He has a lot of other entertaining things and videos that he drops, but he became very much known for these roast videos. He did a whole these kids can't be stopped series or this person can't be stopped. Now he even has a video about Takashi 69. Things are getting a little bit weird. It just keeps going in one way or another. And this is when we get to his music. Speaking of drama, rice gums first music tracks were diss tracks. He was making diss songs and of course those got a lot of attention for songs and he wasn't really that good. He has gotten better. He's still not like the best rapper in the world, but he got plays. His most popular song is a diss track response to Jake Paul's It's Every Day Bro titled It's Every Night Sis. And if you look on YouTube, it has over 130 million views. There are a lot of real rappers who aren't getting those numbers. So what exactly does that mean? I know a lot of people might say, yo, well, yeah, that was a response. This track and it's all because of the YouTube. Nobody really likes it musically for real, but let's remember that's on YouTube. People didn't just listen on YouTube. Go to Spotify. You'll see it has 36 million views, which brings in the question. Does that make rice gum a legitimate rapper? I think the more important thing is acknowledging the fact that YouTubers can literally become legitimate rappers despite what a lot of people are thinking because I hear a lot of people say, yo man, I don't want to get caught up in the YouTube thing. Well, we're going to talk about rice gum's basic formula at the end. But think about Cardi B. When it came to strippers in the past, people didn't think you could overcome that stigma of being a stripper, but it's already been proven, which it should have been known already. Once you have the music good enough, you can transcend that, but you just have to keep performing with that music. When it comes to rice gum, if his music was actually really, really good, I'm pretty sure that he could transcend and become a rapper if he wanted to. He doesn't really want to become a rapper. At least it doesn't seem like it. He just doesn't for fun. He does these diss tracks, but he can even tour off of what he has in the audience he has, which is more important to acknowledge the fact that when you rise like this as a YouTuber, you become a marketing machine for yourself. Not only did rice gum just drop these tracks, but he plays his music at the end of his videos and he can put it anywhere else in his videos. He has his own merch line like a lot of rappers and he can wear his merch all the time. He can mention his merch whenever he wants to because it's his platform and he's dropping videos more than anything. His fans are watching as often as he drops and he gets millions per video. Once you have the marketing machine, you can pretty much do what you want with it. So now let's talk about the basic formula that rice gum has. It's pretty straightforward. One, he got attention. How do you do that by creating drama-driven engaging content? Now there's other types of engaging content. He used drama after he had that attention. He continued to entertain. Sometimes it was more drama-driven content. Other times it was just humor in general, but he used that in the consistency of doing that to build a brand slash personality. Once you have that, that's when he started to just move it into other categories. He had people bought into who he was, his brand and personality, and then he said, yo, buy this rice gum merch. Yo, watch this series. Yo, listen to this song. And that's pretty much it. And it's not as easy as a lot of people think it is. Hey, if I wanted to, I could just do these kind of videos and then later become a rapper. It's not exactly that easy to be consistent and create the engaging content again and again and again. It's a task. Trust me. Now I do want to know what you guys think about this. Could he become a legitimate rapper outside of what you think about his quality of music? If he wanted to, do you foresee a YouTuber in the future becoming a legitimate rapper? I wanted to do this video to open the door for that conversation because there is another video I want to do on another YouTuber who actually doesn't have as big of a following and as many listens, but I think it's probably on a more straightforward path to becoming a legitimate rapper than a lot of people would think. But for now, that's it. So if you like this video, go ahead and hit that like button. If you like it, you might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button.