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bbno$ Found Sanctuary Online. Now, He Wants to Pay It Forward to Others: Cover Story
He’s the always-viral rapper, singer and songwriter who’s earned more than a billion Spotify streams, back-to-back Juno Fan Choice Awards and prime upcoming slots at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and NXNE next week (check back at Billboard Canada for more details).
He’s the artist who has record labels scratching their heads by reaching the fans they wish they could, right where they live: on the internet. He’s also someone who describes his live show as “the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in my life” and means it as high self-praise.
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But for the 30-year-old Vancouver native, the tougher question is: who is Alex Gumuchian?
“It’s a fine line,” he says, speaking over Tibetan momos at Loga’s Corner in Toronto. “I use bbno$ as an avenue to be the most extravagant self I want Alex to be on a regular basis, but I can’t.”
His music has helped him find his voice and his confidence. Now, he’s focused on figuring out the man behind it.
bbno$ (pronounced “baby no money” not bibinos) is currently on the Internet Explorer Tour, his biggest-ever global tour on the heels of his self-titled 2025 album that hit No. 33 on the Billboard Canadian Albums chart and spawned the hit “check,” which took over the airwaves and landed at No. 50 on the 2025 Year-End Billboard Canada Radio Songs Chart. A bbno$ show is a high-energy and unpredictable event, filled with memes, costumes, props and laser dicks. It’s also extremely supportive, a space for fans to be their weirdest selves and bond over brain rot. It’s like a non-toxic version of the internet come to life.
For Gumuchian, that’s important. Online is where he found community as a homeschooled child in B.C.
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“It was kind of like my main friend,” he remembers. “I played World of Warcraft for years, and I met so many people that way. I fell in love with how much community there is [online]. The most important thing for me is distilling that for people who enjoy positivity and want to have fun, because there's so much of the opposite in the world.”
Now, he sees a lot of himself in his fans. He wants the community around bbno$ to be what the internet has been to him: a place for people who can express themselves freely no matter how insecure they might be outside of the fandom.
bbno$ is embedded in the cosplay community, and so are many of his fans. He’s also a major supporter of drag as an art form. He featured Priyanka and other performers from Canada’s Drag Race onstage at the Junos for his performance of “It Boy” in 2025.
This year, he couldn’t attend the Junos, but sent Priyanka in his place alongside a bbno$ cosplayer named Baby Joe Money who she led through the red carpet on a leash. She was supposed to accept the Fan Choice award for him if he won it, but he soon learned that the Junos doesn’t let you send others to accept in absentia so he watched from his tour stop in Iowa as presenters Majid Jordan accepted it instead.
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Still, he’s happy he won the award for the second time. Operating on his own strange frequency, he’s not used to receiving that kind of industry recognition, but the Fan Choice is the only award chosen entirely by vote, which is the kind of accolade he does care about.
“It’s the only democratic vote,” he says. “So, modestly speaking, I won the whole Junos.”
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bbno$. Coach shirt and jeans.Ed Gumuchian
Gumuchian dabbles in drag himself. His first dalliance was for the 2020 video for “Imma” with first season Canada’s Drag Race star Jimbo, who he now calls his drag mother.
“That was the moment I was like, ‘this is f–ing awesome,'” he exclaims. “I walked into Starbucks to get a coffee and the barista gave it to me for free. I was like ‘this is the coolest I’ve ever felt in my life.”
The “extravagant beauty” his drag self opened him up to “being my more extravagant self,” he says, and he’s since done it again in videos like “Yoga” with Rebecca Black and the more recent “NSFW,” again with Jimbo. He says Jimbo said he was the only person in the world she was fine with doing drag with a beard, and patiently answered all his questions about tucking.
Though he’s sometimes received accusations of “queerbaiting,” Gumuchian is a big supporter of LGBTQ+ causes. At the second edition Baby's Bonanza, his hometown self-funded fundraiser festival in Vancouver, which raised more than $125,000 for the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, he led a chant of “protect them dolls,” supporting trans rights at a precarious time in the U.S. and throughout the world. The phrase is also a rallying cry in his Kreayshawn-sampling song “bing bong.”
Maybe because of the self-conscious silliness of his music, people are sometimes surprised when Gumuchian uses his platform for serious causes. But he doesn’t see the two things as contradictory in any way.
“If I can be a support for marginalized communities, why the f– wouldn’t I?” he explains.
“I grew up in a very loving household, which is a privilege. Now, I will be a beacon of love and hope for my fans, and ride to Mordor and back — Lord of the Rings reference,” he says (yes, the last part too). “I was homeschooled and I grew up in Vancouver, so I was pretty tied to the ground and nature and the earth and a lot of hippie stuff. I grew up wanting to help people. I wanted to be a doctor. But I feel like I’ve helped infinitely more people than I could have helped [as a doctor] with music.”
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Because of his support for the LGBTQ community, some of his online fans have openly speculated about his own sexuality. There are whole Reddit threads dedicated to discussing whether he’s straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, or even if he’s a top or bottom.
When asked about it in interviews, he typically deflects with a joke or makes a bigger point about toxic masculinity.
Over dumplings now, he says his answer isn’t so cut and dry. He doesn’t want to label himself, not because he doesn't like labels, but because he’s still figuring it out for himself. All of his relationships have been with women, but that doesn't necessarily define him now.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” he says.
In typical bbno$ style, he answers the question by taking it in a whole different direction.
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"I'm 30 years old and I did a copious amount of mushrooms a couple months ago," he says, waiting for my follow up question. "I had feelings and thoughts I never had before.”
What those thoughts mean, he doesn't know yet. What he does know is that the expectations for sexuality as a young single musician don't seem to fit him.
When he first started touring with Yung Gravy in 2017, he saw his friend and fellow rapper hooking up with women wherever they went. He thought that was what you’re supposed to do on the road, so he tried to get into the spirit too. But he found he was much happier between shows hanging out and playing video games.
“Sometimes I’ve even thought I’m asexual,” he says. “Most of my relationships historically have ended because I… I'm not the most intimate individual.”
bbno$. Coach hat, tank top.Ed Gumuchian
He hasn't had time to work on himself, he says, because he's had such success in music. That’s taken up most of his attention for the better part of a decade. Though the music is often light and funny, he takes it very seriously. His empire is built by a combo of business savvy and hyperfocus.
Despite his somewhat granola Vancouver homeschooled upbringing, Gumuchian is the son of first-generation immigrant parents — an Armenian father from Egypt and a Danish-Swiss mother — and he says it instilled a “bag or die” work ethic.
bbno$ is an independent project, and Gumuchian is involved in every aspect. He even personally signs off on every invoice.
There was a time when big labels were trying to sign him. In 2019, his endlessly catchy single “Lalala” with producer Y2K was going viral and charting on the Billboard Hot 100. It cracked the top 10 of the Canadian Hot 100 and charted in high spots in countries like Australia, Hungary and Lebanon.
Gumuchian took every label meal that was offered — mostly because he wanted to eat for free — but often left with a bad taste in his mouth. Executives would clearly misunderstand his music, sometimes asking questions like whose vocals were on the song, clearly attracted solely by the view counts.
He remembers one meeting with Island Records, he says, where someone leaned in next to his ear and told him he has a lot of leverage. “I stood up and started laughing at him. That made me so uncomfortable.”
A couple of years later, “Edamame,” another viral bbno$ track with Rich Brian, was gaining momentum in the Baltics. Gumuchian signed a deal with a marketing and digital strategy company to try to capitalize. The company spent $71,000 on TikTok promotion and it resulted in 12 million views. A video he posted with his ex-girlfriend putting a filter on his face got 21 million.
It feels like he instinctively just gets the internet, but there’s both strategy and brute force behind his online success.
It’s not just about putting out a hooky song that people will use for their own TikTok videos (creates), but finding the specific clip or timestamp that will catch the algorithm. He and his small team of content creators have all sorts of strategies for making that happen, like posting ideas and skits and clips underneath a song, then using their main idea after they’re all deployed to give every clip a boost. Artists pay digital marketing firms big money to deploy strategies like these, but Gumuchian likes to think he can do it better himself.
“Sometimes we’re just getting lucky, but a lot of the time we are putting a lot of thought into it,” he explains. “Is it working to the nth degree and I’m Taylor Swift now? No. But it's clearly not, not working.”
Gumuchian loves digging into the analytics, seeing where his most active listeners live, where he should tour, which songs are hitting people. He’ll break it down into parts. Is there a certain bass sound that is resonating? When he posts a song on SoundCloud, which moments of the song are people commenting on? He’ll look at at it atomically, seeing which parts of his music fans are responding to and then save it for later.
“Then when I want to make another song, I know it will guarantee to pop off,” he deadpans. “I just take every single aspect of every single song that I've ever made and just put it all on one song. It’s a cheat code.“
That’s how some of his biggest songs are made, like “Edamame.” That’s a cut and paste of elements of other bbno$ songs, like “Nursery,” “Bad Girl” and “Who Dat Boi.”
Lately, he’s been experimenting with different energies from his upbeat four on the floor dance and rap styles, with songs like “Why Am I Like This” exploring balladry and minimal Gorillaz style indie pop sounds on “Round and Round.” His slower songs generally don’t perform as well, he admits, but he likes doing them. “If I could be Mac DeMarco, I would,” he says.
That’s why he generally sticks to the high-energy stuff when he performs live, screaming, jumping and doing cartwheels. Wearing his Oura Ring, he peaked at 953 calories in one show and typically measures more than 10,000 steps.
Gumuchian has multiple ideas at all times and a compulsion to get them out. He’s up for trying anything and seeing what works. If it doesn’t go viral, he just moves onto the next thing.
He's dropping his first clothing line, Fun Job, this Sunday (June 7), he's working on an animated TV series and, very slowly, his own incorporated nonprofit organization.
"I want to help underprivileged artists find scholarships with universities, and support online artists who are getting annihilated by AI," he says. He's still fleshing out the details, but he envisions things like music workshops, health care support, even housing. He sees the role that music played in his life and wants to create a sanctuary for others.
Now that he’s found success and financial stability, he’s promising himself he will take some time to figure out the man beneath bbno$.
“I think I know bbno$ pretty well. But I don't really know Alex.”
What he does know is that he’s ready to be the truest version of himself.
“I found myself through music," he says. "Once I started making music, I felt like I was accepting myself.”
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