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Over the last four years, Harry Daniels has repeatedly gone viral for his videos ambushing celebrities to sing their music back to them
The TikTok star tells PEOPLE, however, that he has plans to launch a music career, inspired by the likes of Madonna
“It’s not what I want to be the No. 1 thing on my legacy,” he says of his viral stunt clips, “but it’s certainly something that’s going to be a massive part of my career”
When asked which pop star’s career he hopes to one day replicate, Harry Daniels recalls one of his earliest interviews, where he told Rolling Stone in 2024 that he was a “student of the greats” — namely Madonna.
“Everyone got really mad at me,” Daniels tells PEOPLE, laughing. But his answer hasn’t changed.
At 22, the social media star has become a mainstay of TikTok virality. His schtick — ambushing celebrities to sing their music back to them — still hasn’t gotten old, four years after he first went viral for performing a strained rendition of Sabrina Carpenter’s track “Skin” to the pop star at a meet-and-greet in 2022. For proof, look no further than the massive slate of content he pumped out during Coachella last month: He raked in tens of millions of views, singing for every A-, B- and C-list personality he could find roaming the grounds in Indio, Calif.
Daniels’s earliest memories of the internet dates back to watching his “fair share of YouTubers” as a kid while growing up in Long Island, N.Y. Though he graduated from high school a year early, when he got to college, he was a self proclaimed “terrible student” — so Daniels decided to drop out after his first year and pursue internet fame instead. Then came the video with Carpenter, and the rest is history.
Looking back four years later, Daniels thinks his longevity online can be chalked up to his admittedly encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture — knowing just the right song to perform for the right celebrity at the right time. (To former President Barack Obama, for instance, he sang a Halsey track that includes the lyrics, “We are the new Americana / High on legal marijuana.”)
“I think you can tell there’s joy in it,” he says. “If I’m making people happy, that’s all that matters, where it gets 100 views or a million views.”
But recently, Daniels has a couple of new projects in the works: a podcast, called “Chronically Online,” and a six-track EP, which he’s in the process of wrapping up. The latter, he tells PEOPLE, is what he hopes will be only the start of an ambitious career in pop music in the vein of Michael Jackson. (In 20 years from now, he says, he hopes to “be on album 10 by that point.”)
Making music — beyond his viral singing stunts — is nothing new for the internet personality, who first started producing his own songs at age 12 in his bedroom. But at 22, his dreams feel far more in reach than they did as a college dropout only a few years back.
Harry Daniels
Credit: Cody Lidtke
“I’m not gonna be discovered by some random person in a cafe because that doesn’t really happen,” he remembers thinking then.
So was his viral TikTok career only a mere means to the end of pop stardom? What happens to the Harry Daniels the internet knows and loves when he transitions to musician?
For a while, he tells PEOPLE, he did expect to completely disavow his viral, celebrity-ambushing persona in service of a more serious career in music. But now, on the precipice of dropping his first songs, Daniels doesn’t necessarily consider his social media background to be something he has to leave behind fully to become a pop star.
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“I kind of just think of it as a general extension into a larger world I’m creating, and, I suppose, a larger storyline for people to follow,” he tells PEOPLE. “For the longest time, I was like, ‘This is just a stepping stone for me.’ But no.”
Continues Daniels, in reference to his viral singing clips: “It’s not what I want to be the No. 1 thing on my legacy, but it’s certainly something that’s going to be a massive part of my career. I look at it as an ingredient in a larger stew, if you will.”
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