Billie Eilish — The Complete Guide to the Most Streamed Artist

Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell was born on 18 December 2001 in Los Angeles, the daughter of two actors, home-schooled alongside her brother Finneas O'Connell, and introduced to music through the Los Angeles Children's Choir at age eight. In 2015, Finneas wrote a song called Ocean Eyes for his own band, decided it suited Billie's voice better, and uploaded it to SoundCloud. Within weeks it had been heard by millions of people. Billie was thirteen. By the time she was twenty-two, she had won ten Grammy Awards, two Academy Awards, and become the most streamed artist on Spotify — male or female — in the world. This is what happened in between.

The Four Albums — Everything She Has Made So Far

Billie Eilish has released four studio projects in nine years. Each one is a complete artistic statement — a record that sounds unlike the previous one while remaining unmistakably her own. The thread connecting them is Finneas: every album produced in the same intimate way, the two of them in a room, making sounds that nobody else makes.

Finneas — The Collaboration That Changed Pop Music

Every Billie Eilish record has been produced by Finneas O'Connell — her older brother, who is three years her senior and who began writing songs for her when she was a child. The first Ocean Eyes recording was made in Finneas's bedroom on consumer equipment. The Grammy-winning albums that followed were made the same way: the two of them in a room, no outside writers, no production committees, no interference from Interscope Records. The label signed Billie when she was fifteen and then, remarkably, left her and Finneas alone to make whatever they wanted.

The result is the most consistent creative partnership in contemporary pop music — an artist and producer who share a musical language developed over an entire childhood together, who can communicate through music in the way that only people who grew up in the same household can. Finneas has won eight Grammys alongside Billie. He also has his own solo career. When Billie describes his contribution, she is specific: "He hears things differently than anyone I've ever met. He hears what something should be before it exists."

The Records She Holds — 20 Guinness World Records and Counting

Billie Eilish holds twenty Guinness World Records. A partial selection, because the full list would take longer than most of her songs:

Bad Guy — The Song That Changed Everything

Bad Guy was released on 29 March 2019 as the fourth single from When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? It is one minute and forty-six seconds of bass-forward, whisper-sung pop that sounds like nothing that existed before it — a song about the performance of toughness that is simultaneously a take-down of that performance and a demonstration of it. The production (Finneas, again, in the bedroom) uses a bass drop that became so widely recognised it functioned as a meme before the album had been released for a month.

Bad Guy topped the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks, dethroning Old Town Road by Lil Nas X after a nineteen-week run. It was the first song by an artist born in the 21st century to reach number one in the US. It was certified Diamond by the RIAA — one of a tiny handful of songs in history to achieve ten million certified sales and streams in the US alone. It is the most streamed song by a female artist on Apple Music and the only song by a female artist in Apple Music's top ten most-streamed songs of all time.

🎵 Music Poster · Bad Guy · Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish — Bad Guy Poster

The poster for the most streamed song by a female artist on Apple Music — Bad Guy, the song that made Billie Eilish inescapable in 2019 and has not stopped since. Bold, immediate, unmistakably Billie. 260gsm museum-grade satin paper with archive pigment inks. Available in A6, A5, A4 and A3. From 98types Studio, Camden Market.

From £3 Buy 3 Get 1 FREE Same-Day Dispatch 260gsm Museum-Grade

Shop Bad Guy Poster →

Getting Older — The Most Honest Song She Has Written

Getting Older was released on 30 July 2021 as the opening track on Happier Than Ever. It is a quiet, undefended account of the specific ways in which being famous as a child changes a person — the things that were done to her that she could not name at the time and can name now, the ways in which the body keeps score, the experience of getting older inside a public narrative that was fixed when she was seventeen and has not fully updated. It is one of the most emotionally precise songs of the 2020s.

"I'm getting older / I think I'm aging well / I don't know if that's true / But someone told me so" — the ambivalence in that opening is the ambivalence of anyone who has survived something difficult and is not entirely sure what surviving it means, whether the survival constitutes growth or just time passing. Getting Older is the song on Happier Than Ever that sounds most like it was written for the person Billie actually is rather than the artist Billie is supposed to be presenting. This is why it is the album's most discussed and most revisited track despite not being its most commercially successful.

🎵 Song Lyric Print · Getting Older · Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish — Getting Older Lyric Print

The most emotionally honest song on Happier Than Ever as lyric wall art — Getting Older, Billie Eilish's quiet, precise account of growing up in public and the specific weight of that experience. Warm, stylish typographic layout. 260gsm museum-grade satin paper. Available in A6, A5, A4 and A3. From 98types Studio, Camden Market.

From £3 Buy 3 Get 1 FREE Same-Day Dispatch

Shop Getting Older Print →

If You Love Billie — These Prints Belong on the Same Wall

The 98types pop music collection pairs naturally with Billie Eilish — the artists who share her generation's sensibility and the wall art that belongs in the same room as a Bad Guy poster.

Browse the 98types pop music collection, song lyric prints and the complete bestsellers.