“Right after the concert, I got a call from my parents saying that I had to rush back to Italy because the finance police was looking for me”: Slap bass phenom Davie504 lifts the veil on the pressures of becoming a YouTube megastar

As many a guitarist or bassist who has found their own niche on social media or YouTube will tell you, the content game is a constant hustle.

While it may look easy at face value, it requires a consistent dedication that’s not for the faint of heart. In a candid video, bassist Davide Biale, best known by his online alias Davie504, has lifted the veil on the grind that is amassing a following as a guitarist or a bassist on YouTube, and the potential repercussions.

“If you have been following me for a while, you might have noticed I basically disappeared for years,” he divulges in a recent YouTube video. “I used to make three videos a week, and [now] I barely post anything, and I’ve been getting so many worried messages from you [about] what happened, why I stopped.”

He continues, “I always had a dream, a goal that inspired me to keep working hard, and I have been struggling to find that goal recently. I will explain why I’ve always been scared of taking breaks from making content, because I know what happens when you take breaks – a big part of your audience just leaves and probably doesn’t come back. You need to constantly grind, constantly keep the ball rolling, because if you stop, it’s almost impossible to come back.”

Biale explains that, in 2020, with digital content soaring as the world locked down because of the global pandemic, he could “100% focus on doing something that I loved with no distractions,” and the metrics reflected that, as he was getting “insane views.”

However, he got addicted to the grind, even saying that, at one point, “if a video didn’t get 1 million views in like 24 hours, I would feel very anxious and stressed.” Things got even worse with short-form content.

“So you could make a billion views from [YouTube] Shorts, which I did, and still not have a real audience caring for you. That’s what really demotivated me. All these numbers were not real.”

Amid all these changes in the digital sphere, what happened in 2023 would prove to be the final straw.

“2023 started very epically with a concert I did with [musical comedy duo] TwoSet Violin. It was 100% the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m still high from that concert. But after that, things went downhill,” he reveals. “Right after the concert, I got a call from my parents saying that I had to rush back to Italy [Biale currently lives in Taiwan].

“The reason why I had to rush back to Italy was because the finance police was looking for me. It’s still insane to me to say this out loud, but it’s the truth. It’s not uncommon – something normal, actually – but that has never happened to me before, and it was actually a pretty shocking experience. I just felt violated. Imagine having four random strangers searching through your private belongings. It was extremely stressful.”

And, while “nothing extremely serious was found,” Biale does admit that, to this day, he’s “still dealing with the tax offices in Italy to fight some disagreements.

“This completely destroyed me – it demotivated me. They made me feel like a criminal, because I believed in my country and I wanted to be honest, [and] that’s the reward I got. And since then, I just felt like it was not worth it.”

Biale reflects that, with the way these platforms are designed, “stopping and taking breaks from making content is terribly bad for your channel, and YouTube will punish you hard” by allegedly stopping recommending videos to the audience the YouTuber has painstakingly built through the years.

Despite these considerable personal, as well as algorithmic, setbacks, Biale shares that he’s doing his best to get back to form. “I’m trying to slowly come back to long videos, and hopefully you will tune in and remember to slap the like button, like the good old times,” he concludes.

Recently, Yvette Young, whose career was initially also propelled by YouTube and social media, reflected on the pressures of touring in the social media age, while one of jazz fusion’s fastest-rising guitar stars, Matteo Mancuso, has also spoken out about how, nowadays, no band, guitarist, or bassist can afford a bad gig due to the online (and offline) pressure to be consistent without fail.

Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN.