Oliver Tree, the musician and visual artist whose song “Life Goes On” racked up more than 464 million YouTube views and became one of the defining viral hits of the streaming era, has died at 32 after a helicopter collision over Rio de Janeiro.
Six people were killed when two helicopters collided Sunday morning in the Recreio dos Bandeirantes neighborhood of Rio’s southwest zone.
A Collision Over Rio
Brazilian authorities confirmed that Tree was among five people aboard one of the helicopters, alongside passengers Lucas Vignale, Gaspar Prim, and Lucas Brito Chaves, and pilot Alexandre Souza. The second helicopter, piloted by Charles Marsillac, was carrying only its pilot. Both aircraft went down after the midair collision, with one crashing into the parking lot of a car dealership and igniting a fire that consumed several electric vehicles on the lot, according to PBS News.
An investigation into the cause of the collision is underway. Tree had been in Brazil for his tour, with his final concert taking place on June 6 in Sao Paulo.
From Santa Cruz Dubstep to Hundreds of Millions of Streams
Born Oliver Tree Nickell on June 29, 1993, in Santa Cruz, California, Tree spent his early career producing dubstep and performing in the San Francisco Bay Area under the name “Tree.” His 2018 EP “Alien Boy” broke him out of the electronic music underground and into online culture, where his distinctive bowl cut, oversized clothing, and deadpan humor made him as much a visual phenomenon as a musical one.
His catalog reads like a playlist of songs that defined how music spreads in the algorithm age: “Life Goes On,” “Miss You” with Robin Schulz, “Alien Boy,” “Hurt,” and “Jerk.” Combined, his music videos have amassed well over a billion views. As Variety reported, Tree was as much a director as a musician, insisting on creative control over his own videos — a decision that helped his visual identity become inseparable from the music itself.
The Loss Hits a Generation of Internet-Era Music Fans
Tree’s ex-girlfriend Melanie Martinez said she has been “an absolute wreck” since learning of his death. The tributes pouring in online reflect something broader: Tree was one of a handful of artists who figured out how to build a genuine music career on the internet without sacrificing creative weirdness for algorithmic safety.
His death at 32 adds his name to a painfully long list of musicians lost far too young. The helicopter crash in Rio is a brutal reminder that the line between an ordinary day and a catastrophe is vanishingly thin — a reality that Tree, with his absurdist sense of humor, seemed to understand better than most.
What remains is the music, and the strange, wonderful persona he built around it. For millions of fans who discovered him through a YouTube recommendation or a TikTok scroll, Oliver Tree was proof that you could be deeply weird and wildly successful at the same time.