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Watch out Adele, Emeli Sande, and the like - a new generation of young female singer-songwriters are charging into the public eye. Here are three emerging artists you should already be listening to.
Halsey
Fresh off the release of her debut album Badlands, Halsey's numbers are soaring.
Making ripples in recent months with her grumbling electro-pop style and raunchy blue hair, Halsey has just come off a support tour for Imagine Dragons, her debut album Badlands dropped late last week, and her upcoming headlining US tour is long sold out.
The young singer from New Jersey (who sounds nothing like her fellow new-jerseyite Fetty Wap) already has a committed online following. She had the most engaged fans on social amongst emerging acts performing at Bonnaroo this summer, and was featured in our recent State of the Industry report with three of most detected tracks on YouTube amongst undiscovered artists in the first six months of the year (These are tracks uploaded to the platform as part of user generated videos). She is most popular on Instagram, where she counts 700,000 followers, but on Twitter she passed half a million followers in early August, and has seen about 1 million mentions in the past month.
Halsey saw a big lift in online streams over the weekend. Graphic courtesy of Next Big Sound.
Her self-released debut single “Ghost” has already racked up about 5 million plays on Vevo, and the latest single off the album “New Americana,” is already attracting weekly stream counts in the millions. “Hold Me Down” is another addictive listen. In just the past week, Halsey and her discography seeded more than 17,000 new stations on Pandora, an increase of 69% from the week before.
Alessia Cara
About 30 seconds in I was already hooked on “Here,” and the young artist responsible for it, Alessia Cara. A few months later, she’s now ready to give us a little more ear candy, dropping her EP this past Friday: four new tracks accompanied by a string of DIY videos. Hailing from the outskirts of Toronto, Cara got her start recording cover songs and posting them to YouTube, and landed a deal with Def Jam when she was 18 (she hasn’t even turned twenty yet, let’s talk about how jealous I am).
Surrounding her EP release last week, she saw a nice bump on social, where her fan base has been steadily growing and engaging over the past few months. 7000+ new Twitter followers is an increase of 120% compared to the week prior, and brings her total to above 100,000. She also counts more than 89,000 followers on Instagram, more than half of which were added in just the last month. The video for “Here” has reached 6 million views on Vevo in total, and the official audio video for “I’m Yours” attracted about 200,000 views over the weekend. Cara’s music is spinning on Pandora stations like Today’s Hits, and more than 8,000 new stations were seeded based on her and her music this past week.
The last three months have been a time of rapid social growth for Cara, who added most of her... [+]
With her EP, Cara demonstrates that she can deliver solid material, with catchy hooks, and a voice to be remembered. I anxiously await more.
Aurora Aksnes
First appearing on the Next Big Sound chart this past June, 16-year-old Norwegian Aurora Aksnes (known as AURORA on stage) has had the music industry across the pond excited for some time, but is only just starting to gain momentum in the US.
The young artist from Norway is just starting to make inroads in the US market. AURORA performing at... [+]
The title track off her debut EP “Running With Wolves” has attracted a quarter of a million YouTube detection views in the US this summer, she is now adding about 1,200 new Twitter followers a month, and earned close to half of her 39,000 Facebook page likes since the beginning of June. Aksnes is currently on the 2015 Spotify “Spotlight” playlist, and is seeing a higher amount of play here than other other services including Pandora and Vevo, though on the latter platform her videos were viewed about 900,000 times in the month of August, an increase of 32%, and her total number of stations seeded on Pandora increased by 103%.
The singer-songwriter has added about half of her total social following over the summer. Graphic... [+]
According to some not-so-subtle hints on her Twitter account, Aksnes plans to release her highly anticipated LP debut next January. For now we’ll settle for a limited, but exceptional body of work.
So get ahead of the top 40 radio game: add these up-and-comers to your playlists or seed a station, and stay tuned for more.
