I first stumbled upon one of Luca Maxim’s videos on my Instagram Reels feed last year. It was a parody of self-improvement content, telling me about five businesses I could start in 2022, which included a backyard oil refinery and a local homeless shelter scam. After viewing that unhinged Reel, I immediately hit follow, and learned that his content ranged from parodies to absolutely bizarre original stories involving sentient animals fighting a group identified as “tech extremists.” These stories all have intricate lore, spanning multiple videos and consisting of myriad original characters such as Paul the Koala and motifs like rare fish and a general obsession with Mongolia.

What stood out was the consistent components across all of his content: a background video of Maxim singing one of his songs before images and text appear as a voiceover tells the story of the video. I was intrigued and entertained but had no idea what the point of any of it was until I saw one video in particular. The narration begins, “‘Do U Bleed At All’ just hit 1 million streams and we did it all organically. No label, no ads.” Were all of these videos just a ploy to promote his music? 

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Over the last few years, TikTok has become the primary source of music discovery, with every viral TikTok song taking over the radio and topping the charts. The company released a report that found 75% of TikTok users discover new artists through TikTok and 63% of TikTok users first hear new music on TikTok. This has driven musicians to create content for the platform, either because of pressure from their record labels or in their own hopes of blowing up. Spotify’s recent efforts to make its app more like TikTok is further proof that music discovery has been co-opted by the video app.

To better understand Maxim’s work, I scrolled back to his first TikTok, posted in March of 2021. It’s a music video for one of his songs, filled with many angles of him singing his song, some sort of machinery, and the largest Cuban link necklace I’ve ever seen. There’s no sign of his now-signature style, just a musician sharing his music.  Hundreds of his early videos are much the same, along with some short confession about his life followed by “I wrote this song with this in mind” or “I made this song today. How does it sound?” Most posts only received a few thousand views.

The first video that even vaguely resembled his later work is from September 2022. In it, Maxim shares his top three ways to get rich in 2022, with absurd suggestions like “collect 5 rare fish a month.” It landed at around 6,000 views, as did another video outlining how to be financially independent by 16. Within a few weeks, he was regularly posting hilarious videos parodying self-help and hustle culture that garnered tens of thousands of views. He was coming into his own—not just as a musician promoting his work but as a creator in his own right. He also posted some popular yet niche memes parodying those subcultures and eventually began to add to them by introducing his ideas of tech extremism and the importance of Mongolia.

In his evolution, Maxim went from someone making generic music videos to someone hopping on comedic trends, to building upon those trends to create an entirely new form of content. He created an audience that he never would’ve found without defining a new world with his stories and characters.

For the culture newsletter Dirt, culture writer Terry Nguyen writes about the rise of worldbuilding, “the creation of fictional worlds with unique settings, histories, aesthetics, and characters,” with roots in science fiction and fantasy. Nguyen posits that worldbuilding has recently evolved into “a thinly veiled commercial endeavor…to oil the wheels of major fan-favorite franchises.” We see this in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and other franchises. Why not in Luca Maxim's stories about sentient animals and Mongolia?

Over Maxim’s hundreds of videos, I’ve learned so much about a world that is vaguely connected to reality: Maxim has a tech extremist twin brother named Khyrsos who is only seen as a shirtless mirror selfie, and Maxim’s song “Do U Bleed At All?” is both an anti-techextremism anthem and a guide to living a life of love instead of fear—and supposedly it will lead me to have a successful business selling Louis Vuitton vacuum cleaners. I learned about talking animals like Gerald the gorilla and Mateo the sloth. It’s all ridiculous and absurd yet strangely compelling, making it impossible to look away.

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A few weeks after his first rare fish mention, before his videos started blowing up, Maxim posted a video of himself wearing a balaclava with the words overlaid, “I’m not on this app to get a viral video. I’m here to share all the dope music I make and build a community around it.” The cynical side of me thinks about how all of his new content could be chalked up to Maxim giving up on this idea and chasing the virality of his humorous videos. 

But when I look at the whole picture, he’s stuck to his vision. In the TikTok world of grifty self-promotion, Luca Maxim took aim at the subculture of creators peddling scams and parodied them until he created an entirely new form of nonconformist art. In doing so, he has built a community of people that celebrate his music as a part of the world and narratives he’s created. By mocking the very idea of hustle culture and audience building through shameless self-promotion, he ended up worldbuilding as an alternative way to connect to an audience.