London: joeshort – “boardwalk”

joeshort is one of those anomalies that could only exist in the digital music streaming age. Categorized as lofi / jazz / chillhop, his first song ‘mosey’ has garnered 4.7 million streams on Spotify in only 12 months. Achieved with no record label, no marketing, no tour dates and virtually no online presence whatsoever. And to make things more confusing, until now it was the only piece of recorded music he’d ever released. The song was featured in Spotify’s playlist ‘Jazz Vibes’ with 800k followers, which seems to have a lot to do with the songs success. Despite having so much traffic visiting his Spotify profile, joeshort doesn’t have an artist biography or any photos posted…which could very well be by choice, as there seems to be an increasing number of phantom artists out there who just make music for the sake of making it, and are cashing in on the age of playlists. However, Spotify rolled out an app specifically for artists, to help them customize their Spotify profile should they choose to do so.

His sophomore release ‘boardwalk’ seems to be following the same musical recipe for success. The song released less than a month ago already has 60k plays on Spotify and is on track to hit 1 million streams within the year. You can listen here.

 

Written by: Edgel Groves