Billie Eilish and her manager are crediting SoundCloud for helping to launch her meteoric career. Eilish released “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud when she was just 13, almost a year before it became a hit on YouTube.
During an interview with Billboard, manager Danny Rukasin and Eilish spoke about SoundCloud’s impact on her career:
Rukasin: Part of it was your understanding of music was the SoundCloud era – putting something up and it goes. And then also, you were – and still are – so genuinely young, and you feel something and want to put it out. There’s a certain amount of, “I want to express this right in this moment,” and then us being the dudes, the old guys, who are like, “No, no, no, wait; let’s do it the right way.”
Eilish: The mixture of me being a SoundCloud fan and teaching them what my experience was while they were teaching me what my career was did benefit [all of us].
Eilish posted“Ocean Eyes” to SoundCloud in late 2015. It has been streamed 54.6 million times there. The YouTube video was published in March 2016 and now has almost 400 million views.
Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.
