- DotComNirvan is a rising
YouTube rap music video maker with over 140,000 subscribers. - He's made videos for a slew of artists including Yeat, Slump6s, Kankan, Matt Ox, and midwxst.
Hit play on a DotComNirvan music video and prepare to be jolted. Rappers teleport and tap dance across car roofs until they dissolve into bursts of light. Neon-lit dancers twist against flashing backdrops. The camera jerks like a faulty crane spinning out of control.
"I love them all, they're my babies," DotComNirvan, whose real name is Nirvan Sorooshian, told Insider of his videos, which have reached 39 million views and 140,000 subscribers on YouTube.
The 25-year-old has worked with a range of artists, from Summrs and Autumn! who make plugg (a style of dreamy hip-hop popular online) and "rage beat" rap which uses menacing synthesizers, to the teenagers midwxst and Glaive, who rose out of digicore, an internet-based scene known for emo lyrics and experimental pop and rap. He's also collaborated with Yeat and Trippie Redd, who started on
Sorooshian started out making a fan video for a rapper, and has since become a go-to source for underground, internet-boosted musicians looking to put graphics to their songs. He's helping artists rise and becoming a pillar of YouTube's indie music video scene.
"There's such a wealth of talent in the underground that's untapped," he said. "I want to help put that on more."
Sorooshian made his first video in 2016 as a fan
Toward the end of 2016, when Sorooshian was 19, he decided he wanted to get involved in internet rap somehow. It's a scene in which artists typically blow up via
Sorooshian already had experience editing skits for the news bulletin in high school, he told Insider, and was inspired by Cole Bennett, who remains one of the most subscribed-to independent video makers YouTube, to try his hand at making a rap video. At that point, he didn't have a day job and was studying full-time, he said.
"I stopped going to class to work on this one animated video," he recalled, saying he decided to create it for "All The Time 2," a song by Florida rapper Wintertime, who started out on SoundCloud.
He sent the fan video to the artist's management on a whim, not expecting anything, he said, and woke up to an email saying they were going to drop it as a video on Wintertime's YouTube channel. The clip featuring a cartoon version of the rapper swaggering across pixelated GameBoy landscapes took off and now has 12 million views.
In September 2017, Sorooshian started uploading official videos he made with rising rappers to his own channel and gradually accrued fans. At first, he said he created them for free, only beginning to charge artists once he was more established.
When he started creating videos full-time, he said it took a lot of convincing for his parents. "I'm Middle Eastern, so school and a solid job was always the expectation," he said. "Now they love it and they're super proud of me."
Sorooshian's profile is rising in the YouTube music scene
While the current YouTube music video scene is "thin," he said, there are a few key figures, most notably Bennett, who has over 19 million subscribers with his channel Lyrical Lemonade. There are also many pages dedicated to "premiering videos," Sorooshian said, where people submit already finished videos and hope they'll get featured.
What separates him from Bennett, he said, is Bennett has "more of a traditional storytelling aspect to his videos" while Sorooshian's videos are plotless, aiming to capture the song's sound.
After shooting footage in person, Sorooshian said, he'll spend 12 to 16 hours a day editing a video with Adobe Premiere Pro, sometimes until he collapses. "I've fallen asleep on my keyboard," he said, and "gotten sick to the point of feeling like I was going to vomit."
When editing, he said much of it "is centered around the beat," and how he matches the song with visions in his brain. One of his biggest videos, Yeat's "Turban," features the rapper shaking atop a vehicle. The hyper visuals sync perfectly with Yeat's shrieks and the pummeling synths.
"The thing with Yeat is, you got to go quick, he's trying to get on to the next thing in his day," Sorooshian said of the shoot. "We pulled his big body into this warehouse and we just had fun."
Sorooshian's videos are helping artists blow up
Of all the rappers he's worked with, Sorooshian pointed to Jace Salter, or Iayze (pronounced "Jace"), as someone whose profile he helped raise the most. In the past half-year, Salter has ascended to internet fame on the back of the TikTok hit "556 (Green Tip)."
Sorooshian has made two videos for Salter, one of which has more YouTube streams than the actual song does on Spotify, while the other has amassed over 1 million views.
It's "just a bunch of us, kids, linking up and making something out of nothing," he said. "That's cool as hell to me, because it's pure, and I feel really lucky to be a part of it and to be a big player in the game."