In the last few months you may have seen an artist under the guise of Marshmello blow up in terms of popularity, especially when the likes of Skrillex, Diplo, and many of the Mad Decent artists supporting this anonymous project.
The real question became, who was behind Marshmello given the quick rise to popularity, an unknown DJ seemed unlikely and the side project of someone already established looked like it was the answer. Let’s have a look at all the facts and see if we can pin the real person behind Marshmello.
The quick rise to popularity came with Miami Music Week bookings along with the announcement that Marshmello would be playing a few Mad Decent Block Parties, along with Mad Decent Boat Party. The big break came on April 5th when Skrillex posted one of Marshmello’s tracks in his weekly “Skrillex Selects” playlists. Soon after, Marshmello released the first official track, a remix of Jack Ü’s track “Where Are Ü Now” featuring Justin Beiber. With such a high profile remix, who was this person that scared an official remix of Jack Ü? Speculation abound, uncovering the true identity of Marshmello begins with four artists linked by a management team.
Moe Shalizi manages Kayliox, Jauz, Dotcom, and Sikdope, all of whom could be Marshmello’s true identity. Moe’s strategy of releasing music and having it supported by each of the artists under the same management has shown to be extremely successful for this group of artists. Each of these artist’s showed their quick support of Marshmello by being one of the first to follow them on various social media, namely Twitter.
This narrows down the list of artists that could be Marshmello to one of those managed by Moe Shalizi. While many people speculated that Jauz was behind Marshmello (myself included), the fact that the Facebook profiles for each of the artists reference different booking agents seemingly seals the deal that Marshmello is not Jauz. This leaves Marshmello’s true identity to either Dotcom, Sikdope, or Kayliox.
Katie Couric did an interview with Skrillex yesterday when Marshmello phoned in to have a quick word with Sonny himself. Throughout their conversation Sonny accidentally lets the name ‘Chris’ slip and instantly the internet had the identity of Marshmello, none other than Chris Comstock, aka, Dotcom.
Now why Dotcom would start a side project that arguably has more support than his original tracks is something we can certainly speculate on. I myself happen to think that this is not a solo project by Dotcom and may in fact be a collaboration between Dotcom and someone else. For now, knowing the identity of Marshmello may be enough, but as with the Zhu mystery, shouldn’t the music be the focus?