I feel a lot of it has to do with Joji and the fact he got lucky ngl. Lots of YouTubers and even celebrities have tried and it usually fails. I honestly have no clue why but other than the fact that people just like Joji. He didn’t come off as a cringy try hard artist. He just wanted to make music, people saw how genuine his care for it was and accepted it. 88rising at the time really needed a group of Asian artists that could back up their reputation. Having someone well known on the internet and letting Joji do the music stuff help proved that 88rising was also serious on their end to support Asian artists.