Before William Marchiafava became better known as BillyisTerrible and toured the country with the likes of Yung Gravy, SavageRealm, bbno$ and Yung Bae. He created vines and comedic skits alongside his high school friends that he would upload to YouTube.
Altogether his vines would gain some traction but his YouTube skits would get little to no views. Then in 2016 he started to become inspired with the new wave of rappers coming out of SoundCloud.
“I feel like I was pretty inspired by the whole SoundCloud wave because you would literally do and sound however you want. The quality didn’t have to be that great but it was still garnering attention from people. That’s what inspired me to do it DIY.”
That same year he recorded his first song that he was too scared to upload. Ultimately he uploaded it a year later alongside more music and that is when his life began to change and his career as a rapper started to blossom.
In 2017 when Fortnite was becoming a massive success, a couple of YouTubers began to use his music in their gameplay videos. This allowed his music to grow and amass a fan base.
He recalls a YouTuber by the name of CeeDay who used his song “Rings” in his gameplay video, that video now has over 14 million views.
“The song was like in the climax of the video. The funniest thing about was there wasn’t even a link to my song. People just found it by searching the lyrics that they heard and that was like a big step. A lot of Tik Tokers started to use my stuff too. It just kept snowballing after that.”
Meme pages and Spotify where yet another reason his music blew up. Instagram meme pages would use his music to accompany their memes. When he began to upload his music to Spotify his tracks would end up in playlists that were heavily rotated.
“Honestly making music made me appreciate it more. I am able to see what my music does for someone else. I get DM’s all the time saying ‘I was really depressed and hearing your music cheered me up’ and that right there is what I do it for. “
In February Billy released a self titled project “Billyy!! - EP” Billy has a unique rap style that he considers to be trash.
“Trash… That’s normally what I say. It’s light hearted, it's not meant to be taken seriously and it’s something to vibe to. It's hard to say someone's music sucks when they already call it trash.”
Billy mentioned how one of the pivotal moments in his career was waking up to that “blue cheese.”
“A very important part in my career is when I got verified on Instagram. I woke up one morning checked my Instagram just like any other morning and saw the blue cheese baby. I was so inspired by getting verified on Instagram I made a song about it. ”
Billy said he is set to release his debut album “Mainstream Meme” in late February of 2020. He is also working on several music videos and planning his first headliner tour.