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

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.”

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.”

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 superstardom. Her 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.”

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 worried. When We All Fall Asleep, released in 2019, immediately shot to number one on the Billboard 200 and she ended up winning five Grammys at the age of 18.

That kind of success, Harper notes, can have knock-on effects. Whenever someone is made the face of a new—”purportedly more egalitarian, less gatekept”—ecosystem thanks to tech, that artist becomes a focal point for critique, especially when people begin to question whether their rise is purely meritocratic.

As early as 2019, BuzzFeed News was questioning whether Eilish’s ascent was entirely organic, citing relationships her family had with the entertainment industry and that she was backed by industry gatekeepers, like Spotify. “Eilish is one of the first artists I heard associated with the term ‘industry plant,’” Harper says. (If she is, consider me fooled.)

This was at the beginning of a now rampant conversation around authentic discovery online. (More recently, the term “industry plant” has haunted the band Geese, whose rapid ascent came into question when WIRED reported they’d worked with a company called Chaotic Good Projects to boost online awareness of the band.) Artists like Addison Rae have been able to build careers thanks to platforms like TikTok, but with the internet awash in slop and bots, discovering anything truly new feels almost impossible.

Still, as Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick points out, despite fake Spotify streams and other tricks of internet notoriety, the majority of marketing companies cannot manipulate The Algorithm. If anything, the relationship between artists and social media is the inverse of what you might expect. “A big artist releases an album on Spotify, Spotify puts it in playlists, and that artist grows on Instagram and TikTok,” Broderick writes. “It’s almost never the other way around.”

Despite the slop and the possibility that the “fan” in the chat may not even be real, people continue to click. Artists like Billie Eilish made it seem like our new favorite band is always one scroll away. Even she is not immune to the pull of the internet. “I’m still on more than I’d like to be, but I can’t help myself,” she says. “There's just so much good shit on there. But also it’s horrible. I have to click the comments no matter what, which is not good for me.”

Styling by Spencer Singer. Hair by Ben Mohapi. Make-up by Emily Cheng.