Julia Alexa has passed 100 million Spotify streams as a fully independent artist, and she built that catalog while enrolled in pharmaceutical sciences at ETH Zürich, with master’s thesis research in cancer immunology at UCLA. The Swiss singer, songwriter and self-taught producer confirmed the streaming milestone on camera in May 2026. No label, no production team, and for much of the run, a graduate science degree in progress on the side.
It is a biography that reads like two people. Julia Alexa, legal name Julia Alexandra Mueller, born around 2001 in Zug, Switzerland, and based in Zürich, took piano lessons from age seven and vocal training from age 13, then taught herself production after her father installed GarageBand on her MacBook. She is entirely self-taught as a producer and engineer. Her self-description on her verified Genius page is still the whole operation in one line: “i write & produce music in my bedroom.”
The other room is a laboratory.
What exactly is she studying?
Pharmaceutical sciences at ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the most demanding technical universities in Europe. The detail has run consistently through her press bios since her album cycle began, and in a September 2024 interview with Zürich’s Stadt-Anzeiger she confirmed she was still enrolled and preparing to travel to Los Angeles to write her master’s thesis in pharmaceutical sciences, focused on cancer immunology research at UCLA. That is not a minor elective. It is graduate-level cancer science, pursued in parallel with an international release schedule.
The timeline shows how crowded those years were. Her 17-track debut album i want to live forever when i die arrived November 10, 2023, with a first-ever headline show at Zürich’s X-tra Musikcafé two weeks later. A six-track EP slipped out that December. The ten-track bandaids followed on July 26, 2024, heading into a Swiss festival summer that included OpenAir St. Gallen, M4Music and Moon & Stars in Locarno. The thesis interview came that September, between festival dates.
How do the lab and the studio feed each other?
Directly, in her telling. In a May 2026 video interview she connected the two careers explicitly: working in the lab requires her to be “very detail-oriented and very perfectionist,” a trait she says she also brings to her music, and she credits her “ambitious” personality for driving both pursuits at the same time.
The same perfectionism that runs an immunology experiment also comps a vocal stack.
You can even hear the day job in the discography. bandaids runs a medical metaphor front to back: the tracklist includes “side effects,” “antidote,” “open heart surgery,” “prayers” and “bandaids” itself. Whether or not that vocabulary came home from the lab consciously, the album’s imagery belongs to someone who spends real hours around medicine.
The bedroom-science method
Her production career was itself run like an experiment. She started self-releasing through DistroKid in 2019, has admitted “the first songs were very bad,” and shipped them anyway, treating every release as a learning rep. The trigger was discovering Billie Eilish in the summer of 2017, right after Don’t Smile at Me: seeing that Eilish and Finneas recorded everything themselves in a bedroom convinced her she “could make music without needing other people’s help.” From there the process was iteration: write, produce, release, measure, repeat, the same loop that built self-taught bedroom auteurs like Artemas on the other side of the same scene.
The independence is structural, not aesthetic. Her masters are credited to her own legal name (the debut album carries a “Julia Alexandra Mueller // Ditto Music” line), and her official bio has always described her as an independent artist. It is a version of the ownership-first path The Ring has documented in how independent artists actually go gold: keep the rights, keep the upside, let the catalog compound.
Did she finish the degree?
Honest answer: nobody outside her circle has said. As of September 2024 she was actively completing the thesis. Her 2026 sample-pack biography drops the academic line entirely and describes her simply as “an independent singer, songwriter, and producer from Berlin and Los Angeles.” That could mean a finished degree, a pause, or just marketing copy trimming a detail. No public source from 2025 or 2026 confirms it either way, so neither will we.
What is confirmed is the shape of the achievement. Most artists with 100 million streams have a label, a manager and a production team behind the number. Most graduate cancer researchers do not have a discography. Julia Alexa has run both systems at once for years, largely alone, and both are still compounding: the streams keep climbing, the releases keep coming, and somewhere between Zürich, Berlin and Los Angeles there may or may not be a finished thesis with her name on it.