Young Maltese Musician Becomes One Of The Country’s First To Hit Insane Milestone On Spotify
Featured Image Original Photo by Chris Vella (Storbju)
At 23 years old, Maltese ambient musician Robert Farrugia has already been involved in a number of musical projects. Because of his genre’s limited popularity, Farrugia is not as much of a household back in Malta as other, more mainstream artists. This however hasn’t stopped the young musician from going viral on music-streaming website Spotify, where he recently hit a milestone most Maltese artists struggle to even come close to.
One of Robert Farrugia’s tracks has now been played over 1,000,000 times!
Last summer, Farrugia’s title track Slow Morning had exceeded 250,000 streams. Even then, that amount was well over most of the country’s artists, even much more radio-friendly ones. A relatively unknown name in Malta, Robert suddenly had (way) more Spotify plays than the likes of Winter Moods, Airport Impressions, Red Electrick and The Travellers combined. He even had more streams than Malta’s veritable music queen Ira Losco, whose Eurovision 2016 entry Walk On Water was the only track that got more hits (well over a million then, just over two million now).
So how did a young, relatively unknown Maltese musician from Mosta get to having his track played a million times?
Last year, two very important things happened.
After joining Spanish record label Archives, Robert started having his tracks chosen for popular podcasts all over the world. By the end of 2017, his album Slow Morning was featured in a Best of 2017 list by popular New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.
A couple of days after all this, Robert was told that his album’s title track would be featured on an official Spotify playlist, handpicked by the site itself. From there, his songs suddenly went from having less than 1,000 plays each to each hitting 20,000 in a couple of days. But at the head of it all, was his track Slow Morning. One year later, in fact, the track went from breaching the coveted 250,000 target to exceeding one million earlier this week.
“It’s so surreal,” Robert told Lovin Malta of his latest achievement. “It’s funny because I had just written that track in a day, in my bedroom.” He went on to explain how, with limited equipment, he recorded Slow Morning – and the entire album with the same moniker – with one synthesizer (an M-Audio Venom) and a field recorder.
“Having my music be appreciated by people is already great,” Robert said. “This, however, is something else entirely.”
Even with such an impressive milestone under his belt, Robert is definitely not stopping here.
Last week, Archives released a sneak peak of their latest compilation to be released soon. The compilation features a number of artists signed to the label, including none other than Robert Farrugia himself.
Robert is also planning on releasing an album later this year: “More details will be given out later on,” he said. Until then, staying tuned on his official Facebook page is definitely your best bet.
The young Maltese musician is also currently working on new music with Eyes to Argus, a four-piece band that’s been making waves in the local alternative music scene for the last year.
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