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MUSIC

Norwegian DJ Kygo breaks Spotify record

Electronic artist Kygo has become the fastest artist to hit one billion streams on Spotify, capping a phenomenal year for him, the music site said Thursday.

Published: 18 December 2015 17:25 CET
Norwegian DJ Kygo breaks Spotify record
Norwegian DJ Kygo. Photo: Kygomusic
The Norwegian DJ, a key figure in the tropical house genre that has won a growing following, reached the billion-mark in a little more than a year.
 
Kygo's first major solo release came in December 2014 — “Firestone,” a mellow dance track that gradually builds to the vocals of Australian singer Conrad Sewell.
   
He later followed up the success with the track “Stole the Show.”
 
While hailing Kygo on his own merits, Spotify cited his success as an example of the possibilities of streaming, which offers unlimited, on-demand music online.
   
Spotify, the leading streaming site, has faced accusations from a number of artists that it pays back too little for musicians to earn a living.
   
The Swedish company said that it quickly identified Kygo and cooperated closely with his label, Sony's electronic-oriented Ultra Music.
   
Spotify said it first worked to promote “Firestone” in Europe before launching a global push to acquaint its users with Kygo.
   
“We knew when we signed him that he had a fanatical following, and we were really able to harness that with the support of Spotify as a global partner on the project,” Toby Andrews, head of electronic music marketing for Sony Music International, said in a statement.
   
The 24-year-old DJ is set to release a debut album in 2016.
   
Spotify said that other recent stars — such as British soul singer Sam Smith, the big winner at the last Grammy Awards — usually needed two years to reach the billion-stream mark.
 
 But Spotify and its competitors — such as Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play Music and Tidal — have seen rapid growth in the past few years.
   
For the year as a whole, Canadian rapper Drake was the most streamed artist on Spotify, despite his close relationship with Apple Music.
 
“Lean On,” the downtempo dance track by Major Lazer featuring DJ Snake and Danish singer Mo, was the most heard single song, with more than 578 million streams as of Thursday.

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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