By Jon Caramanica
This past spring, Tommy Richman got famous off a TikTok.
Well, not famous exactly. Popular. Let’s say popular. Tommy Richman got popular off a TikTok.
Or maybe that’s not quite right either. How about: This past spring, a snippet of a song used in a video on TikTok catapulted Richman, a young soul singer with some promising earlier releases, onto the path to fame.
The snippet was of “Million Dollar Baby,” a deliciously saccharine pop-funk thumper, and the TikTok it soundtracked was a loose clip of Richman and his friends having a fantastic time in the studio one night — a warm little bolt of you-shoulda-been-there fun. This was in April, and before long, the clip had millions of views, and the audio was inescapable. Eventually it appeared in over 9 million videos on the app. Radio play followed quickly, leading to a No. 2 debut for the song on the Billboard Hot 100, followed by a few months in the Top 10.
Stardom secured, right? Not quite. While “Million Dollar Baby” is one of this year’s defining singles, Richman remains largely a cipher. He hasn’t done many interviews; he had a needless social-media kerfuffle over how people taxonomize his sound; and his debut studio album, “Coyote” — which pointedly and stubbornly did not include “Million Dollar Baby” or its follow-up cousin, “Devil Is a Lie” — arrived with a whisper in September, and disappeared even more quietly.
This isn’t to consign Richman to pop’s deep bin of one-hit wonders. If anything, the current pathway for breakout successes, especially via TikTok, is more insidious than that. Viral smashes like “Million Dollar Baby” often feel like hits without stars — potent for soundtracking and sticking to content made by others rather than attached to the artist who actually created it.
This year saw a seemingly endless stream of starless hits, more than any time in recent memory.
In addition to “Million Dollar Baby” (No. 2 peak on the Hot 100, 969 million streams on Spotify), there was “Lose Control,” a retro screamer by Southern metal-soul singer Teddy Swims (No. 1 peak, 1.34 billion streams); “Beautiful Things,” a squeaky-clean sleaze-rock number by Benson Boone (No. 2 peak, 1.62 billion streams); “Austin,” a peppy country-by-algorithm jam by Dasha (No. 18 peak, 668 million streams); “Stargazing,” a rootstronic anthem by British singer Myles Smith (No. 20 peak, 560 million streams); “Kehlani,” a crossover drill hit by Jordan Adetunji (No. 24 peak, 294 million streams); and “I Like the Way You Kiss Me,” an artfully generic dark-club banger by Artemas (No. 12 peak, 1.07 billion streams).
Even the convincing country-rap hybrid “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey, which was the No. 1 song in the country for a record-tying 19 weeks (948 million streams), falls into this category.
These songs are ubiquitous on radio, streaming playlists and social media, but are these today’s pop superstars? Or even tomorrow’s? It remains to be seen. Having a hit might be the easy part; attaching their names to their songs is likely to be much harder. And this year made clear that the process of making a long-lasting pop hit and the process of achieving and maintaining A-list pop stardom are diverging for real, a byproduct of TikTok, streaming, postpandemic habits and more.
In the social media wilds, hits emerge from TikTok and other platforms largely disconnected from anything highlighting the creator of the music. The song — and much more often, a snippet of the song — is a prompt. It is likely tethered to a piece of media that stars you, or another stranger, rather than the person or people who made the music.
For young artists early in their careers, this may be a worthwhile trade-off, a boost of attention that could possibly be converted, with hard work and some luck, into more sustained success. But the relative frictionlessness of social media allows for a song’s rapid spread and absorption, far too fast for an actual human artist to keep up with. And the constant churn in those spaces means that any stickiness is precarious at best. That leaves these otherwise lucky performers attempting to claw back and claim their own sound once it begins to catch fire.
Those are horrible conditions to foster stardom. Viral stars who have become something more than that usually have gifts as content creators, too, à la Lil Nas X.
But what about those who’ve already built an ample fan base and need to find ways to maintain it? Even the biggest pop stars can struggle to generate hits, suggesting an emerging two-track system of pop success: hits without stars, and stars without hits.
As pop stars age, they now become album artists. An album is verging on a vanity project; it is an offshoot of pop superstar privilege, of having the time and resources and creative instinct to attempt a grand statement, or at least a lengthy one that can be sold at a premium.
These can be idiosyncratic concept works, like Tyler, the Creator’s “Chromakopia” — one of this year’s biggest rap releases but not one that’s spawned a litany of singles. They can also be data-dump-thick albums like those released by Zach Bryan, who every now and again scores a big hit but doesn’t organize his releases around singles.
Or take “The Tortured Poets Department” by Taylor Swift — undeniably the biggest pop star working today — which remains in the Top 10 several months after its release. Nevertheless, only two singles broke out with lives of their own: “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” and the Post Malone collaboration “Fortnight,” the album’s lone No. 1.
This hasn’t been the case for all A-listers. Billie Eilish’s album “Hit Me Hard and Soft” remains near the top of the chart months after its release, and also has spawned huge singles that are central to the year’s cultural conversation and that advance a new idea about Eilish’s public personality.
And the rapid rise of Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan has demonstrated that the power of breakout singles can be enhanced when the performer has a well-defined and social-media-cognizant gift for public presentation.
But artists who want to remain in the zeitgeist at the level of the sky and also the ground are finding that deeply challenging. Dua Lipa, once the most viable pop superstar under 30, found few toeholds with her latest album. And stars of one generation earlier are outright flailing. Think of Halsey’s Cindy Sherman manqué rollout, in which she dressed up like icons of generations past, or Katy Perry’s extravagant style rebrand: loud marketing, zero hits.
Which is what makes the success of Richman so appealing: There may have been some light strategy underpinning it, but the scale of its explosion was staggeringly out of step with how much forethought went into it. It’s almost as if the more effort you put into attempting to create such a moment, the more impossible it becomes.
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