TikTok can feel like this total wasteland of videos you’ll love once and then never see again. While that is absolutely the case, I think there’s a beauty to TikTok. Anyone in the world can share their thoughts, life, or music, and they all have a chance at capturing the platform’s attention. As a TikTok user, I have my very own folder titled “woah.” It’s where I collect videos of lyrical and sonic genius when I’m not ready to let them just disappear into the wasteland. A couple singing the purest love song I’ve heard in years. A clip of a live performance that made me stop in my tracks. About 200 people with guitars on their beds all over the world, singing a song that they loved enough to post and that I loved enough to save.
Among these 60-second clips of greatness, there exist artists who really matter. Someone like Jake Minch is the reason I wanted to write this piece. I saved a video of him singing an original of his called “Handgun” in 2022 when he first posted it. I just really liked what he had to say. The song was honest and introspective in a way that knocked the wind out of me. Through just one 60-second video, I was invested in this stranger’s song and voice more than most of the music on the radio. I wasn’t the only one. It racked up around 2.5 million views with hundreds of thousands of likes and comments from the likes of Lizzy McAlpine and Noah Kahan.
I gave him a follow, and a few years later got completely consumed by his debut album “George.” Last September, it felt like I closed the circle when I stood in a venue in New Hampshire watching him open for The Backseat Lovers, thinking about how wild it was that a video on my phone had led me here (killer performer, for the record).
TikTok, for musicians, is not just about virality (although that is an undeniable portion of it). It’s also about discovery. It’s like anybody in the world can play the role of an artistic and repertoire (A&R) scout. You can find an artist before the world catches up, save their video or drop a follow and watch from a distance as everything you already knew about them becomes obvious to everyone else.
The Moment
I’ve been deep in the music side of TikTok for as long as I have been on the app. I don’t even know exactly when it happened. Definitely around the pandemic times of 2020, more and more artists were posting snippets of their songs on TikTok. The art of songwriting has always completely enamored me. I watched a YouTube video of Taylor Swift writing a song in 2014, and it totally rocked my world. So when TikTok started surfacing singers with guitars in bedrooms, I was the target audience.
One of the first musicians I remember stumbling across was Kahan (ever heard of him?), back when he was posting videos of a little song called “Stick Season.” I added it to a playlist and started listening to everything he’d put out. Then, the “Stick Season” album came out. He became one of the biggest folk acts in the world. Though he was making music for a long time before, TikTok undeniably transformed his career. I think he really recognizes and appreciates this transformation, which is exactly why you can find him in comment sections of people like Minch and, when it came time to put together his massive 2026 Great Divide Tour, he chose artists like Annabelle Dinda and Bella Kay to open for him. He recognizes their potential. After all, he’d been there himself.
This is the new pipeline: a phone, a song, a video that changes a career. For a specific kind of artist — the kind who’s been writing songs for years with no industry connections and no label money behind them — it’s a real opening that changes everything. TikTok creates the most democratic shot they’ve ever had.
From My “Woah” Folder
Dinda is a New York-based indie folk singer-songwriter from Radnor, Pennsylvania. In late 2025, she posted a video of herself singing a song called “The Hand.” Immediate chills. It garnered 12 million views insanely quickly. The song stood out to me because it was etched with a kind of rage that was so familiar. The lyrics provided an almost meditation on gendered double standards. It’s a (dare I say) perfect song, and it was even more perfect for that kind of TikTok virality, checking the boxes of being both deeply personal and completely universal.
I saved the video to my appropriately-titled “woah” folder, and instantly, I couldn’t escape it. Fan edits were made with every possible piece of media. People were creating their own covers. It soundtracked a lot of really emotional videos. Essentially, Dinda hooked the world with the power of her voice and what she had to say. Her debut album, “Some Things Never Leave,” came out in January 2026 and now has nearly 42 million streams on Spotify. She’s currently opening for Kahan at Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, and Citizens Bank Park.
Minch has 106,000 followers on TikTok. His most viral video is from June 2022, him on a bed with a guitar, singing a song called “handgun.” The lyrics had me staring at the ceiling for hours. Because of that song and that video, I was already making Minch foam fingers. Confirmation bias aside, I gave his debut album “George” a listen (and geez). It is the kind of record that gets under your skin slowly and then all at once.
I listened to it on a six-hour plane ride on a loop and cried just about the whole time. I can’t overstate how much I adore this album. This is truly a thank you to TikTok because without it, I wouldn’t have discovered an album that ended up being one of my all-time favorites. He has opened for and performed with the likes of The Backseat Lovers, Del Water Gap, Grace Enger, Jeremy Zucker, and McAlpine. This year, he is opening for Joshua Sloan’s tour on the horizon. He is building something real, something I, and millions of others, really believe in.
And then there’s Kay. I first saw her through a video of her singing her song “The Sick,” and I genuinely broke into tears. The lyrics hit somewhere specific and quiet. The kind of poetry that gets caught in your mind and makes your stomach hurt from the weight of the honesty, sort of ripping you open. People were totally hooked. She had something to say, and it was undoubtedly worth hearing. “The Sick” garnered 9.2 million views on TikTok and reached number 33 on the U.K. singles chart. She kept the attention of the masses with songs like “iloveitiloveitiloveit” peaking at number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100. She’s now opening for Kahan on the U.K. and Ireland leg of the Great Divide Tour. She went from a video to an arena, and she did it by writing something so honest it stuck.
What Now?
The viral moments are easy to romanticize. What’s harder and more interesting is what these artists do with them.
Because TikTok virality alone does not make a career, the platform is full of artists who had their moment, got the streams, maybe even got the record deal and then disappeared.
So what separates the ones who stick around? Looking at the artists who’ve actually built something, a pattern emerges. None of them went viral because they were chasing a trend. They went viral because they wrote a real song and sang it as they meant it. The TikTok wasn’t a strategy. It was just them, being themselves, in a format that happened to reward authenticity in that particular moment.
Gigi Perez is another example worth looking at here that almost doesn’t need a TikTok origin story anymore. I almost forgot about mentioning her because her success has completely superseded the platform. Her song “Sailor Song” racked up over 8.3 million TikTok videos and 900 million Spotify streams, not because it was engineered for the platform but because it gave people something to hold onto. Fans used it to share queer love stories, mental health experiences, and reflections on loss. The song was bigger than Perez and bigger than TikTok. It became a vessel for other people’s stories, which all the best songs do. She’s now on her debut album cycle, headlining shows across the U.S. and Europe.
These artists are songwriters first. The platform came second. That ordering matters more than anything.
The Other Path
It’s worth noting that TikTok has produced more than one kind of music career, and they don’t all look the same.
People like Addison Rae and Alex Warren really intrigue me. They were both products of TikTok’s Hype House era and are both best new artist nominees at the 2026 Grammys. They represent a different path entirely. Their start on TikTok was not as musicians but as personalities, with massive followings already in place. Music existed as something on top of their success, as a sort of “what now?” Their careers were constructed on an audience that already loved them before they’d written a single song.
That’s a legitimate path. But it’s a fundamentally different one. The artists this article focuses on didn’t have a following to fall back on. They had the song or they had nothing. Which is maybe exactly why, when the moment came, it felt so undeniable. There was nothing manufactured or expected underneath it. There was just talent, hitting the right person at the right time. It’s all very authentic in a way that is difficult when everyone is chasing fame and virality.
What this means for the industry
The music industry spent decades operating on a model that required gatekeepers. You needed a manager to get to a label, a label to get distribution, distribution to get on the radio, and radio to get heard. The whole system was built on access, and access was controlled by a small number of people with a large amount of power.
TikTok didn’t just disrupt that model. For certain artists, it made it irrelevant.
An A&R rep no longer has to discover you in a club or catch your demo tape. They can watch your video go from 10,000 views to a million overnight and reach out the next morning. They have a way of seeing what sticks without even testing anything. Artists are signing deals now not because they impressed someone in a boardroom, but because they already proved there’s an audience. The risk calculus has completely flipped.
That doesn’t mean the industry is suddenly fair or equal. The algorithm has its own biases, and not every genuinely talented artist gets their moment no matter how good the songs are. But it’s a new opening. The path exists in a way it didn’t before. For a generation of singer-songwriters who grew up posting in their bedrooms and dreaming about Spotify numbers instead of record deals, that matters.
Here To Stay
I still have that Minch video saved. I’ll probably never unsave it. There’s something about knowing you found someone before everyone else did, before the tour dates and the album press and the opening slot for a band you’ve loved for years. Something about being in that New Hampshire venue last September, watching him perform and thinking, “go me!” Because, of course, I had no dominant hand in shaping his career, but TikTok allows this sort of interpersonal feeling that we did it together.
The artists who last are the ones who give you that feeling. Not because they gamed anything or figured out the algorithm or happened to post at the right time on the right day, but because they wrote something true and real. They set up their phones and hit post, and the honesty reads through the screen in a way that simply cannot be manufactured.
Dinda is about to play Fenway Park. Minch’s album was my most listened to record last year. Kay made me cry to her lyrics on a random Tuesday. I have now seen Kahan, whom I first heard on TikTok years ago, in a sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl. These people have really soundtracked my life. Something that was just mindless scrolling became truly listening.
None of this is a TikTok story. It’s a music story. TikTok just made sure we heard it.
