Sweet Streams
Image: Lasse Floede
In the four years since Astrid S graduated from Norwegian Idol, she has turned herself into a pop sensation whose songs rack up more than a million streams a day across the globe. So how did this girl from the north country scale those heights – and keep her feet on the ground?
Words: Paul Mitchell
When the music historians of the future look back over the career of Norwegian pop star Astrid S, 2017 will probably be the year singled out as her watershed moment. Although she has been releasing music since 2013, it was only last year that she became one of the top 100 streamed artists in the world, clocking up in excess of one million streams per day. For statistics fans, that means twelve people pressed play on an Astrid S track every second of every day of 2017. Just don’t ask Astrid for the inside scoop – she was so busy she didn’t even know she had become one of the biggest pop stars in the world. “Really? Am I? Oh wow,” she laughs, incredulously. “That feels really good! There are so many great artists out there. I’m just really lucky that people want to spend time listening to my songs.”
Born Astrid Smeplass in 1996 in the small, mountainous region of Rennebu, 400 kilometres north of Oslo, Astrid showed a precocious talent for music from a young age. “My parents told me that when I was very little, I reacted to music in a different way to the average two-year-old,” she explains. “I think I was born just being really interested in music. I’ve always had an ear for it.”