How TikTok Turned A 13 Years Old Romanian Singer Into India's Newest Sensation

Dharia has ranked number one in Shazam India's chart for several months in a row

As expected, Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” sintagm was cut down to only 15 seconds. Following the trend of Generation Z’s attention span plunging to microseconds, a rather young platform found success with super short videos of people fooling around. TikTok, the former music.ly, has quickly become the one stop shop for videos going viral across its 25 million active users base. So, what does TikTok have to do with pushing songs into international spotlights? Well, it all comes down to obsessive rhythms that tend to get stuck into your head way longer than you wished. Short 15 seconds audio clippings from songs are used as a musical background for challenges or just for plain ol’ lip sync. The easier to remember and replicate, the more viral the video goes, promoting the song along TikTok’s young audience.

Dharia wrote Sugar & Brownies when she was only 13 years old. She was discovered by Monoir, the Romanian producer and songwriter who was already running the hit making Thrace Music record label for a few years. Maybe it was the simple & contagious hook, maybe it was the Eastern melodic strings references, the things is that Sugar & Brownies was used in no less than 1.7 million TikTok videos, a figure that pushed it to the number one position in Shazam India’s charts and brought the Romanian teenage singer a world wide distribution deal with Ultra, along with the attention of the Billboard magazine global edition.

Almost 100 million Youtube plays later, Dharia’s hit shows no signs of stopping, according to the charts extracted from Soundfeed, Sugar & Brownies still generates over 6 million plays per month, even if it’s 1 year passed since the release date.

Her second single, August Diaries, replicates Sugar & Brownies success recipe with roughly the same haunting wordless chorus. The song was released on the 6th of March and has quickly started to get traction, being featured on Spotify’s Release Radar playlist and in over 200 user playlists worldwide. Signs of a future hit? Most probably. And things get more interesting as August Diaries is available for licensing in Soundfeed ;)

Next on our news bulletin: a few (not so) secret methods of gaining extra cash from your Youtube channel!