Sometimes, you grow followers steadily and slowly. More rarely, oodles of them show up overnight. In aleksiah’s case – after recently getting playlisted by some serious players – it’s the latter, racking up nearly a thousand Spotify followers in a week and putting some jet fuel into an already-solid growth spurt over the last ten months.
Let’s start with the Spotify followers, because it’s all just so mental. From mid-April last year until about a week and half ago, aleksiah was growing well, but nothing that you wouldn’t expect from a talented emerging artist with a few tracks out in the world. All that changed after 20th Feb, when – backed by a team including Chugg Music, Stellar Trigger, and Select Music – her latest track ’24’ blew out into the world and onto some of the more important playlists in Australia (more on them in a minute).
The impact on her Spotify follower count was immediate, and daft. Nearly a thousand people added aleksiah to their libraries all at the same time, turning what had been a good nine months into a stellar ten. When you’re this early into a project and your follower growth is pushing 500% in less than a year, you’re not doing much wrong.
There actually weren’t a huge amount of Johnny-come-latelys in terms of critics and tastemakers either. Across 2023, aleksiah had turned enough heads last year to have already scored support across both Spotify and Triple J’s influential lists. In fact, when this latest track was released, she was already picking repeat adds to both Spotify’s New Music Friday AU & NZ and Triple J’s New Music Hitlist – that’s really hard to do as an emerging act at all, let alone twice in a row.
So far then, literally no-one will be regretting backing this exciting artist, and seeing those sorts of growth numbers should pretty much guarantee enthusiastic support from both humans and algorithms in the future too. Light the blue touch paper, stand well back.
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* I tend to use Spotify Followers as the key metric to watch, instead of Monthly Listeners or Popularity. Monthlies are great, but they can be messed up by an artist being a contributor or songwriter on another artist’s track, and (along with Popularity) can fluctuate pretty wildly. Followers implies a conscious choice of preference from a user, so for me is the strongest and steadiest signal of solid, ongoing audience support.
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