It is possibly one of the slowest viral hits for a long time, but a Billie Eilish cover of a Drake song that lived on SoundCloud for five years has now got an official release across all streaming platforms. 

Eilish had covered Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’ back in June 2018, the year before her debut album came out, and it was uploaded as she was steadily building a profile online. 

The original cover, named in typical Eilish style (and with total disregard for proper nouns) as ‘hotline bling’, has had over 13m plays on SoundCloud to date. It is safe to presume the bulk of those plays arrived after she became one of the biggest solo acts in the world. 

It is – and look away now if this is upsetting – a ukulele cover that builds by adding reverb and synth textures. It has a run time of 2.13 and was one of several covers she was posting back then (such as ‘Dancing On My Own’).

It recently took on a whole new viral life on TikTok where it was being shared and reacted to so much that Eilish issued an official version of the track. This official version is only a minute long but has already hit 60m streams on Spotify in its first two months. 

The track had been issued on a limited-edition Record Store Day vinyl single – and she has performed it live multiple times – but this marks its full migration from SoundCloud. 

It all shows a changing of the guard for music virality. SoundCloud was where acts used to go to build a following and hope for something to catch fire (i.e. the running joke of adding the addendum “check my soundcloud” when a tweet goes viral continues today). Now it is TikTok powering a five-year-old SoundCloud post and making it go viral. 

What is most interesting is that the original SoundCloud release was twice as long as the “official release” – but the “new” release is still long enough to qualify as a play on DSPs and short enough to demand repeated plays. As such, it shows how acts are tailoring their music to the specifics of each platform. 

Two-minute tracks on SoundCloud, as so many were demos or home productions, were totally normal five years ago; but as SoundCloud gives way to TikTok, tracks will have to be cut again to suit the audio expectations of audiences weaned on TikTok.