Spotlight – Mike Williams
Mike Williams is a young Dutch DJ born in 1996. He is from Kortenhoef, North Holland. He has been described as one of the pioneers of Future Bounce a sub-genre of Future House alongside DJs Mesto, Justin Mylo & Brooks.
His first started to become interested in music at age 6 when he first learnt to play the piano. At age 12 he learnt to DJ and produced his first track. By the age of 14, he was getting regularly booked around Holland.
At the beginning of his career, he first started to gain attention after uploading numerous remixes and bootlegs of songs such as ‘Blame’ by Calvin Harris & ‘I Really Like You’ by Carly Rae Jepsen. These received over 3 million plays on Soundcloud. He then started to release his own tracks such as ‘Candy’ with Dastic. Due to the success of these tracks, the labels soon came calling.
Eventually, he signed to Spinnin Records. On February 29, 2016, he released his first single ‘Sweet & Sour’ on Tiesto’s Musical Freedom Label. This single peaked at number 6 on the Beatport Top 100 chart. His next big break came when he was invited by Tiesto to perform their new collaboration at Ultra Music Festival in Miami.
On August 5, 2016, together with Tiësto, he released “I Want You” through Musical Freedom as a free download. The single received over 16 million plays as of March 2017. He also performed at the Amsterdam Dance Event for the first time.
2016 had been a whirlwind for Mike Williams. He opened the main stage of EDC Las Vegas, jumped on stage with Tiesto at Ultra Miami, and played many other big festivals. At home, his profile has only continued to grow – he’s played Amsterdam’s 17,000 capacity, Ziggo Dome, twice, and even hosted his own ADE showcase. Tiesto continues to be a mentor, enlisting him as his only support act and even releasing a collaborative track alongside the young talent for Spinnin’. After several more successful releases. To document his incredible journey, he’s enlisted the help of his videographer sister Michelle; ‘On Tour with Mike Williams’ is an episodic look into the life of the producer and will focus on his hectic schedule as he travels the world.
In 2017 he reached number 60 in the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs another milestone in his young career. This sweet-spot debut in the Top 100 marks another hectic year for the 21-year-old. Now signed to Spinnin’, he has hammered us a consistent flow of bouncy, uplifting EDM anthems that often come with their own acoustic covers and modish videos. Hits include such things as the classically-informed dynamics of ‘Don’t Hurt’, the hyper-infectious hooky hit ‘Let’s Go’, the much darker, dramatic chugger ‘Step Up’, the warm euphoric ‘Bambini’ (on Tiesto’s label) and the soul-surging jet-setter DJ anthem ‘Jet Lag’…. Something Mike can definitely relate to, having performed extensively across Europe, Asia and America throughout the year.
The future is bright for him with recent tracks with Dastic and R3HAB gaining him over 70 million streams in the process. This year may seem him climb in the DJ Mag Top 100 to even higher heights than before.
Check out Lullaby with R3HAB Below 👇
