3,000 strangers in a chat room named it number one.
My biggest song — the one with over a billion streams — was named by a stranger on the internet.
I made the track in my basement studio that I was renting illegally for cash. I sent it to my label and they sat on it. Months. Then more than a year. But I knew it was amazing, so I thought: what can I do here? I started playing it in every single DJ set. I'd just keep playing it until something happened. Every time I dropped it, people went nuts.
Then COVID hit. Everything shut down. No shows. No income. It was looking like I was actually going to have to get a regular job. But I had one last chance left — I found out I could take out a £50,000 loan to keep chasing the dream.
So I got my decks, set them up on a plank of wood in my living room, and started doing live streams twice a week. The first time I went live, 3,000 people showed up. It was amazing. So I kept going. Every week I'd drop this song and the whole chat would lose it. "What is the Ferrari song? We need this Ferrari song."
But the crazy thing — it wasn't even called Ferrari. It was called "Do You Still Want Me?"
Then the song started blowing up on the internet, and I found out someone was planning to release a copycat version. Literally the same as my song. I had one choice: let it happen, or move faster than I'd ever moved before in my life.
I went straight to the studio and finished the track that same night. Two days later we released it on our own label. We called it Ferrari — the name the internet had already chosen for us.
A few months later I was in Belgium, about to play Tomorrowland for the first time ever. I'd just landed in the airport, so tired, hadn't been to bed. My manager texted me: Ferrari just hit number one in two countries. One of them is Belgium. The country I was standing in.
A song I'd been playing for two years when nobody knew what it was. It finally caught up.
I made it illegally. Finished it overnight. Released it myself. And 3,000 strangers in a chat room named it number one.
