Icelandic Jazz superstar ‘Laufey’ (Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir) broke Spotify’s all-time streaming record for a jazz album, garnering 5.7 million streams in one day for her second album ‘Bewitched’. Laufey was also Spotify’s most-streamed jazz artist of the year in 2022, with 425 million streams across all platforms.
Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir was born in 1999 from an Icelandic father and a Chinese mother, who is a classical violinist. Her grandfather was a violin educator at the Central Conservatory of Music in China: Laufey started learning piano at the age of 4 and the cello at the age of 8 and graduated from Icelandic music school ‘Menntaskóli í Tónlist’ in 2018, where she also studied singing for two years. She spent her childhood moving between Reykjavík and Washington, D.C. At age 15, she performed as a cello soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Laufey participated in ‘Ísland Got Talent’ (2014, finalist) and in ‘The Voice Iceland’ (2015, semi-finalist). She became hooked on the jazz standards of Ella Fitzgerald after digging through her father’s record collection. In 2020, while still a student at Berklee College of Music, Laufey released her debut single “Street by Street,” which went on to top the Icelandic radio charts. Following the release of her 2021 ‘Typical of Me’ EP, Laufey was named ‘Best New Artist in Jazz and Blues’ at the Icelandic Music Awards and hosted her own show on BBC Radio 3/BBC Sounds. Her debut full-length ‘Everything I Know About Love’, debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Alternative New Artist Album chart, and the lead single “Valentine” peaked at #1 on the Spotify Jazz Chart. Laufey graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 2021, and currently resides in Los Angeles. As of August 2023, Laufey has signed a global publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music (WCM).
Discography (albums):
2022 ‘Everything I Know About Love’
2023 ‘A night at the Symphony’
2023 ‘Bewitched’
Read more on Laufeymusic.com
