Billie Eilish Doesn't Know if There Will Ever Be Another Billie Eilish | WIRED

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Nearly a decade ago, Billie Eilish, then 13 years old, put “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud and catapulted to global super stardom.

It was the kind of ascent aspiring singers dream of, propelled by a platform that at the time wasn’t known for unearthing pop stars. But if you ask her now, even Eilish, now 24, doesn’t know if someone else could replicate her success. “Oh my god!” she says when asked where the next Billie Eilish might be discovered. “I have no idea.”

Photograph: Darrell Jackson

These days it’s common for new artists to share their music on SoundCloud, but back then it was still relatively new. “I’m very curious to see what the future holds,” Eilish says. “I don’t know where the next whoever is gonna come from. I can’t wait to see them and I can’t wait to cheerleader them, whoever it may be.”

If they ever come. Ten years ago artists could build followings, like Eilish did, through livestreams, Instagram posts, and videos on social media. In 2026, the landscape looks very different. Everyone seems to know, or claims to know, how to beat the algorithms to get streams and views, but very little of it feels authentic, especially in a world full of AI slop. Eilish and her fans grew up online, but they may not want to hang out there the way they once did.

Eilish, to be clear, still believes true talent can break through the noise. Art, she says, should be “attainable for everyone” and the internet, while messy, enables that. “There’s all sorts of technologies now where it seems like we’re all doomed, but we’re not,” Eilish tells WIRED. “If we keep making real stuff, real art made by humans—live music, live audiences—I don’t see that ever dying.”

Billie Eilish codirected her new concert film Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) with James Cameron.

Photograph: Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images

If anything, Eilish’s new concert film Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), out May 8, serves as a testament to IRL connection from a performer known for her online relationship with her fans. Shot in 3D—by Eilish and James Cameron, no less—the film was made to immerse the audience in the concert experience. In between footage from shows on her most recent tour, there are interviews with acolytes about their connection to Eilish’s music. The movie can feel like fan service, but it also demonstrates the value of collective experiences. A call from an internet darling to go out and touch grass—even if it’s in a multiplex.

By the time Eilish released “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud in November 2015, “Gangnam Style” and Justin Bieber had proven YouTube could lead to hits, but few pop stars, save for maybe Taylor Swift, were as publicly online as their fans. Eilish used a playbook from hip-hop artists like Chance the Rapper and the collective Odd Future—who had built their own internet undergrounds through video-sharing sites and downloadable mixtapes—to attain massive super stardom. Her former manager Danny Rukasin told Billboard in 2019 that it was important that Eilish have a complete persona like Chance and Travis Scott, adding “there’s a little bit of that hip-hop zeitgeist in this project.” Not too long after, the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica was calling her “the first SoundCloud-rap pop star, without the rapping.”

Billie Eilish shot to fame as a teenager after putting her song “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud.

Photograph: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images

During her ascent, many profiles of Eilish made hay of her popularity online, complete with Instagram and Spotify stats. Fan accounts popped up to share and reshare all of Eilish’s music and shenanigans. Her notoriety as a Gen Z artist, says Paula Harper, a musicologist at the University of Chicago who has studied internet fandoms, also made her a “really useful rhetorical figure for music journalists to articulate industry shifts in the digital age.”

The internet enabled all manner of indie acts to find their followings, but when technology promises more access to artists, fans expect it as part of their experience of music. The dynamic becomes circular, Harper says, “and then that increased access to (purportedly) musicians’ real lives and personalities encourages fans, listeners, and critics to read music more closely as expression of that artist’s identity.” This also leads to fandoms that treat posts as Easter eggs, where details are assumed to be a clue to an artist’s life.

Eilish, who signed with Interscope label The Darkroom in 2016, seems to have understood this. As she was preparing her debut LP When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? she was followed by a documentary crew for what would eventually become The World’s a Little Blurry. In it, her brother Finneas, with whom she’s written most of her songs, notes that she is “so woke about her own persona on the internet that I think she’s terrified of, like, anything she makes being hated.”

She needn’t have wor