Laufey Built the Audience. Then She Signed.
Laufey sells out arenas, has two Grammy Awards on the shelf, and is one of the most streamed artists of her generation. She got there playing jazz standards on a cello, in a format that was never supposed to reward her.
In September 2026, Laufey signed with Interscope Records and Verve Records. It was her first major label deal, and it came six years in, with three studio albums, two Grammy Awards and a 70-date arena tour already behind her.
That order matters. This is a story about building an audience you own first, so that the deal, when it comes, is a choice rather than a rescue.
Nobody Expected That Music to Scale
The Journey: Laufey's Career Timeline
Posts jazz standards from home during lockdown. “Street by Street” arrives in April and tops Icelandic radio.
Releases Typical of Me, a seven-track EP of jazz standards and originals, the same year she graduates from Berklee.
Everything I Know About Love. She signs a global recordings deal with AWAL, an artist services company, not a traditional major label, and keeps creative control.
Bewitched becomes the biggest jazz album debut in Spotify's history.
Wins her first Grammy: Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.
A Matter of Time debuts at #4 on the Billboard 200.
A second Grammy. Royal Albert Hall to arenas. Announced for Coachella. In September she signs with Interscope Records and Verve Records, her first major label deal.
Streaming was not built for this music. The format rewards playlists, short attention spans, and songs that hook inside the first eight seconds. A twenty-two-year-old cellist singing standards was not the profile of an artist about to sell out arenas, and most of the industry would have told her so.
She had a viral moment, but viral moments are cheap, and most artists who have one have nothing to show for it eighteen months later. What Laufey did with hers is the part worth copying: from very early on she built a direct line to her fans, and she protected it.
For Six Years, No Major Label
In 2022, with her audience growing fast, Laufey signed a global recordings deal with AWAL, an artist services company, rather than a traditional major label. She kept creative control, and the reason she gave was the people listening:
“I didn’t think that there was anybody at any label who would understand my audience.”
Laufey, to Music Week, 2025
That choice had a practical consequence. With no label marketing machine behind her, every fan she could reach on release day was one she had found herself, through links she owned. That is why the rest of this story is about plumbing.
She owned the front door
Laufey’s audience is spread across Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, TikTok and Discord, in twenty-five countries. Three of her biggest listener cities are Quezon City, Los Angeles and São Paulo. No single platform reaches all of them.
Most artists solve this badly: a different link for every platform, and a link in bio that goes stale the week after release.
Laufey’s answer has been consistent since 2021. Every release, every video, every merch drop and every giveaway points to one place she controls, laufey.ffm.to, and two kinds of link do the work.
Two links. Two jobs. Both hers.
Both of these are live right now. Both are Feature.fm links.
Bio link
laufey.ffm.to/links
The single URL in her bio. The album, the vinyl, the video, the shop, the playlist, all swappable without changing the link.
Smart link
laufey.ffm.to/amatteroftime
One release, every service, plus the official store, so the fan chooses, not the artist.
Pre-Release Fan Capture
The clearest look at how this works is the campaign for A Matter of Time, her 2025 album. It ran for fourteen months, and every single moment in it had its own link.
Ahead of release, fans were sent to a Feature.fm Pre-Save, which captured their intent at the point where excitement was highest:
One pre-save. Four things captured.
What a fan can do in a single step after pre-saving A Matter of Time.
- Add the album to a playlist of their choice
- Follow Laufey on their streaming service
- Save all of her future releases automatically
- Share their email address with her
Every fan who completes it is saved in Laufey’s Feature.fm Fan CRM.
Then on release day the same campaign converted automatically into a Smart Link. The URL never changed. Fans who had pre-saved already had the album. Fans arriving fresh were sent straight to it in their preferred service.
Seven Links, Fourteen Months
She Ran Giveaways Too
Laufey does not only use links to deliver music. She uses them to run a relationship. Since 2022, every one of her giveaways has run on a Feature.fm contest link.
Five Years of Giveaways
Every one of these ran on a Feature.fm contest link, and every entry asked the fan who they were.
- A twelve-day holiday giveaway run
- Signed vinyl, tees, a signed book
- The Bewitched giveaway, August
- A Very Laufey Holiday, December
- Valentine’s and festival tickets
- Laufey’s 12 Days of Christmas
- Localised campaigns, May–June
- The A Very Laufey Day merch bundle
By 2025 the giveaways were running in five languages. Spanish, Portuguese and German campaigns went out in May and June; the A Very Laufey Day bundle ran in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French at the same time.
And they did not all run in English. A fan in Brazil who enters a giveaway in Portuguese is a fan who now exists, with a name, an email address and a country, and who can be reached directly on the day tickets go on sale in São Paulo.
The platforms owned their listeners. She owned hers.
Every link in this story does the same quiet thing underneath: it asks the fan who they are.
None of it is dramatic on the day it happens. Across six years and four album campaigns, it compounds into something no platform can take away, throttle, or reprice.
What “Capturing A Fan” Actually Looks Like
One side is what the fan sees. The other is what the artist keeps.
The AskEnter to win the A Very Laufey Day bundle!
I agree to join the artist mailing list and to be contacted if I win a prize. I may also be contacted in accordance with the Feature.fm Privacy Policy.
Every entry becomes a fan record in the artist’s Feature.fm audience: email, name, country, the service they connected with, and when they joined, filterable into segments the artist can actually act on. Product view, sample data.
And she could contact them any time she wants.
Monthly listeners are a number you rent from an algorithm. It goes up because a playlist added you and down because it didn't, and either way you find out afterwards. A fan who gave Laufey their email address during a holiday giveaway in 2022 is someone she can still reach in 2026: on announcement day, on tour on-sale day, on the day a new vinyl variant goes live.
Every artist is told to build a direct relationship with their fans. Very few build the plumbing for it while they are still small enough that it feels premature. Laufey was doing it as a Berklee student with a seven-track EP, and the audience she started collecting then is the audience she took into arenas.
By The Numbers
Six years of public milestones, none of which happened because of a link, and all of which had a link underneath them.
The Public Record
All figures public: Spotify, Billboard, the Recording Academy.
Then She Signed
On 16 September 2026, after six years as an independent artist, Laufey signed with Interscope Records and Verve Records. The terms have not been made public.
What is public is the order of events. She signed with three studio albums, two Grammy Awards, more than seven billion streams and a sold-out arena tour already behind her. None of it was built with a major label’s money or machinery. Most artists sign in order to get those things. She had them first.
That is the part worth paying attention to. A deal can change how an artist’s music is distributed and marketed. It does not change the six years she spent collecting her own audience: the emails, the countries, the services they use. Nor does it change the fact that she can still reach those people directly, on her own schedule, without asking anyone.
Laufey Built Her Own Audience and used Feature.fm to Help Her do it
She built it song by song and city by city, over six years, with no major label behind her and a body of work nobody at a streaming service would have predicted could fill an arena.
What we did was much smaller, and we are happy for it to stay that way. Every time a fan went looking for her music, we made sure they found it in one tap, in the service they already use, in a language they already speak. And every time they showed up, we made sure she got to know who they were.
None of this needed a label or a budget. It costs nothing to point every post at one link you control, or to ask for an email address when a fan is excited enough to enter a giveaway. None of it looks like much in year one. All of it looks like an audience by year six.
Asked once why she is so open with her fans online, Laufey described her own start plainly: “I was just a girl who loved social media, and I love music, and I love that I have a story.” That relationship is the thing this whole piece is about. Keeping hold of it is, in the least glamorous sense possible, what a link is for.
SHARE YOUR MUSIC LIKE LAUFEY
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