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Gem bookends10/31/2023 ![]() But as Taite judge Tony Stamp noted, Chelsea’s fifth album was composed of the best songs the musician had ever written. It was arguably a surprise win: the 2023 nominees list was particularly strong, featuring worthy winners everywhere you looked, from The Beths’ precise power-pop record to Fazerdaze’s powerful comeback EP. Like that’s not acceptable.”Ī few weeks before our call, Princess Chelsea won the Taite Music Prize, New Zealand’s most coveted music award, for her fifth studio album, Everything Is Going to Be Alright. “But it’s not right that only people who have had a big viral hit should be able to sustain a living through music. ![]() ![]() A blast of wind interrupts her for a moment. I express incredulity at her previous revelation: the dire state of streaming is no secret, certainly, but surely a song that’s amassed over 80 million plays on Spotify alone, like “The Cigarette Duet” has, provides more than a paltry payout? “You’d be shocked about how little it did prior to the last couple of years,” Chelsea responds. We’re talking on a grey Auckland day in May, Chelsea bravely battling billowing winds on the ferry from Waiheke – where she’s called home for the last several years – to discuss her journey to winning the 2023 Taite Music Prize. “I think it’s been a bit of a wild west situation with the switch over from physical to digital.” “I’ve only started to get more income from streaming in the last couple of years,” she tells me. In a just world – a sane one – these two songs would have reaped sizeable financial dividends for their creator, but according to Chelsea Nikkel, the musician behind the Princess persona, the reality was much more miserly. Six years later, virality arrived again in the form of “I Love My Boyfriend”, a twinkling, almost syrupy slice of dream-pop that was primed for soundtracking TikTok clips, both serious and not. On the back of the song’s viral success, The Guardian featured Princess Chelsea as its ‘New Band of the Day’. Her song, “The Cigarette Duet”, a swirling back-and-forth between the artist and Jonathan Bree, arguing about the perils – or lack thereof – of smoking, exploded in popularity on YouTube, quickly drawing in millions of curious listeners. In 2012, before people really started going viral online, Princess Chelsea went viral.
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