Arts / Another million Spotify streams for Eamonn
Composer says ‘80,000 people tune into my songs every day’
LOCAL musician Eamonn Watt is celebrating after seeing a second song rack up a massive one million plays on streaming platform Spotify.
The impressive milestone means that his piano tracks A Simple Little Lullaby and Truly Yours have now both been played over one million times each.
Composer Watt, from Sandwick, said he was “absolutely over the moon” to achieve the feat – something that many music acts would only dream about.
The secret to the 26-year-old drum tutor’s success has been getting the songs added to Spotify’s own Peaceful Piano playlist, which has 5.5 million followers.
Spotify allows people to listen to music on demand and with over 230 million users, making it the most popular global audio streaming subscription service around.
Watt said that another of his tracks, Sweetest Dreams, is on the same playlists as the other two songs – meaning that it could potentially rack up another million plays too.
“I honestly thought it would take another 10 years and another 500 songs before I would reach one million overall streams,” he admitted.
Watt, who was recently profiled on Shetland News, has achieved the Spotify success with stripped-back piano tunes composed on a computer.
They are something of a diversion from the often grand orchestral pieces he composes, also digitally, under the name the Virtual Conductor.
Explaining his pathway to millions of streams, Watt said he used one of Spotify’s features where you can send an unreleased song to editors in the hope of being placed in one of its major playlists.
“Initially I submitted a few of my Virtual Conductor compositions but to no success,” he said.
“So what I did was I researched the songs in one of the biggest playlists called Peaceful Piano, and studied the musical characteristics of each song and I thought to myself, ‘hey, I can compose something like that!’
“So with this new sort of formula in mind I composed a trio of lullabies and submitted them to the Spotify editors. I also used another online service called Submithub and Playlist Push, two song plugging services which pitches songs to playlists curated by Spotify users.
“Around 80,000 people tune into my songs every day and it’s thanks to all this promotion from Spotify.”
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