Barclay Crenshaw has Surpassed Claude VonStroke in Monthly Spotify Listeners

Barclay Crenshaw’s birth name project now has more monthly Spotify listeners than the Claude VonStroke project he shelved at the turn of the year.

A few months have passed since Barclay Crenshaw announced that he would take a step away from his world-famous Claude VonStroke house project to focus on basic music under his birth name. In that short time, the latter project has grown to exceed the former in monthly Spotify listeners.

Crenshaw shared the milestone on social media on March 5th, when his Barclay Crenshaw profile sat at 185,500 and that of Claude VonStroke sat at 184,100. At the time of writing, the former has swelled to over 203,100, thanks in no small part to his latest album, Open Channel, which released the following day.

When the Dirtybird label boss first shared plans to refocus his energy toward his Barclay Crenshaw output, the profile had fewer than 50,000 monthly listeners, according to Songstats. Meanwhile, the one for Claude VonStroke had around 209,000 — not a huge leap from where the former account sits right now.

Crenshaw and some of the other core Dirtybird artists spent a lot of their early years championing drum and bass, only setting their sights primarily on house after the label started to gain traction in 2010. Even in 2016, when Dirtybird was in full swing and soaring on the success of its inaugural Dirtybird Campout festival, Crenshaw told me in an interview, “If I could have been a drum and bass producer I probably would have traded it for this.”

The transition back to bass music hasn’t all been sunshine and roses for Crenshaw, however. “When I was playing my new album for record labels, it became very clear to me that some people didn’t understand the music or my decisions,” he wrote in an email sent out to fans in January. “I got a lot of comments like, ‘oh I see, it’s a passion project’ or ‘yeah, ok what’s happening with your VonStroke catalog?‘”

Crenshaw hasn’t ruled out the possibility that he will revive his Claude VonStroke project one day. For the time being, at least, it appears that he plans to stay the course as Barclay Crenshaw.