Every music artist who went viral and sold on TikTok was someone who didn't quit until they hit it big.

When the topic of TikTok comes up, it is usually told with this narrative: a success story where an unknown kid uploads a self-accompanied song with just a smartphone, it catches fire, a label reaches out, and before they know it, they are performing on Kohaku.

I used to think so too. But while writing my previous article, I realized that it doesn't seem to be that simple.

So, I looked into what the eight artists whose names spread over the last three years were doing before they caught fire. I checked them one by one: their debut date, their first post date, their previous affiliations, and songs they released in the past.

As a result, there were no amateurs among them.

Even the person with the shortest run-up had a year and a half of preparation before catching fire. For some, it was ten years. Moreover, several of them had already made their major debut before going viral.

To be clear, this is not to say it was all staged. For all eight groups, neither the artists nor their labels could predict the timing of when they would catch fire. It is just to say that when they did catch fire, they were not all amateurs.

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imase debuted 8 months before going viral

It was in the summer of 2022 that "NIGHT DANCER" spread on TikTok. And in February of the following year, 2023, itbecame the first J-POP song to enter the Top 100 on the overall chart on Melon in South Korea. It later climbed as high as 17th place. I believe this is the one song that most symbolically created the trend of Japanese songs being listened to overseas.

At this time, imase had already made his major debut.

The digital release of his debut song "Have a nice day" was December 19, 2021. Since "NIGHT DANCER"was released on August 19, 2022 that is exactly eight months prior. In other words, it wasn't "went viral and then joined a label," but rather "hit it big eight months after making a major debut." The order is different.

The major debut referred to here is a single digital track.

Going back even further, he picked up a guitar around November 2020 and started DTM around January 2021. He first posted an original song on TikTok in May 2021. The caption at that time was, "An amateur with 0 musical experience tried making an original song (4 months of DTM experience)."

This caption is probably where the misunderstanding began. The person himself is just writing the facts, but people who see this interpret it as "an amateur hit it big on their first try."

In reality, there is a gap of one year and three months from his first post to the release of "NIGHT DANCER." Counting from November 2020 when he picked up the guitar, it is one year and six months until "NIGHT DANCER" spread on TikTok. In this article, I call the latter the run-up.

AKASAKI hit it big on his fourth post

AKASAKI was the same structure.

He started playing guitar in 2022, when he was 16. He made his first post on TikTok in September 2023, which was an original self-accompanied song with the caption, "Please give me a song title."

From there, I started releasing singles. In April 2024, the 1st single 'Hikikomori', in July the 2nd 'Namimakase', and in the same July, the 3rd 'Natsumi'. This 'Natsumi' started to gain some traction first. Then, in that same July, I posted the chorus of my 4th song, 'Bunny Girl', to TikTok. The release of the song itself was three months later, on October 2nd.

The one that hit was the 4th song.

The release of 'Bunny Girl' was October 2, 2024, and the announcement that it had surpassed 100 million cumulative streams was on February 5, 2025. It first appeared on the Billboard JAPAN Hot 100 overall song chart at number 40 on the October 9 issue. Counting from the first post, it took 10 months to hit.

Counting from the day I started playing guitar, it took two years.

It gained a little traction with the 3rd song, and hit with the 4th. That's the order. But what I'm looking at is the number of shots; I feel it's closer to reality to read it as being able to fire the 4th shot because I first built a system that could put out 3 songs. To release a song, you have to record, mix, register for distribution, and create cover art. The fact that I was in a state where I could cycle through that four times was the run-up.

The same pattern exists for Sora Tomonari. On March 31, 2021, the last day of high school, he debuted with the 5-track EP '18', and in November 2022, he provided the lyrics and music for BiSH's 'I'. He posted the demo for 'Oni no Utage' to TikTok in November 2023, and the following month, he released 'Kaisatsu' through Avex's cutting edge label.

Counting from his debut, it was the fire in his 2nd year and 8th month.

Sasane is 6 years

Sasane, who is currently the most played artist in Japan and South Korea with 'mosi mosi?', is also not someone who just appeared out of nowhere.

She has been active as a model since 2020, and started posting covers on TikTok in March 2025. In about a year, her followers exceeded 500,000. On top of that, she released her first original song on April 22, 2026.

Counting from the start of her modeling career, six years had passed.

It wasn't the first song of an amateur. Moreover, this song was not recorded at home by the artist herself, but was produced by a writer named Tamiko Mukoda.produced by a writer named Tamiko Mukoda In Mukoda's words, 'It wasn't just providing a song, but a form where I produced the music for the artist Sasane'.

A foundation of 500,000 followers and a professional writer. The first song fired with these two things in place had 400 million total TikTok views in its first week. 400 million!!!!!!

tuki. has been at it since 13

Perhaps the one closest to a 'Cinderella' story among these eight groups is tuki. Because a middle school third-year student's acoustic performance went all the way to number 1 on the Billboard JAPAN Hot 100.number 1 on the Billboard JAPAN Hot 100

But she started posting acoustic performance videos on TikTok when she was 13. In about a year and a half, her followers exceeded 500,000, and her most popular video has 18.6 million views.

She posted 'Bansanka' in July 2023, which is her second year counting from age 13. It hasn't been made public when she reached 500,000 followers, but at the very least, 'Bansanka' was not her first video. She is someone who had built up an audience before releasing an original.

Someone who kept uploading acoustic covers for over a year and a half eventually released their own original song. When you write it like that, it's not a Cinderella story at all.

Since the starting point varies from person to person, this is not a chart meant to compare the lengths of the bars themselves. What I want you to look at is the fact that not a single person started from zero, regardless of where their starting point was.

Looking at them all lined up like this, there is one thing all eight groups have in common. They all finished one full cycle of something before they caught fire. Their talent was top-tier from the start. What was newly added to that was the time spent on that first cycle.

Monaki's Second Chance

Monaki is the clearest example of this.

They are a four-member group born from the "Second Chance Audition" produced by Junretsu leader Kazuyoshi Sakai, held in October 2023. As the name suggests, it is a project to create a place for people who didn't get their turn somewhere else to stand once again. The average age of the members was 33.

They pre-released the chorus of their debut song on TikTok in February 2026. Their major debut was on April 8th. Then, on June 30th, they won the Grand Prize at the TikTok First Half Trend Awards 2026. The reason for the award stated, "Surpassed 700 million views before their debut."

What's interesting here is that the members and staff themselves say this buzz was completely unexpected.

They didn't aim for it and hit it. It was a coincidence.

But once they hit it, they moved fast. They gathered about 2,500 people for an event on the day of their debut, and by August, they had booked three Zepp venues. That's four months from their debut.

Why can four people with an average age of 33 tour three Zepp venues in four months? I believe it's because they are people who have gained plenty of experience in their respective fields leading up to that point. How to stand on stage, how to time things in front of a camera, and how to run an event—it's already ingrained in their bodies.

When the moment they caught fire arrived, no one was flustered by the assembly process.

M!LK's 10 years and 3 months

The same thing applies to the group side.

M!LK was formed on November 24, 2014, and the pre-release of "Ii Jan" was on February 17, 2025. That is 10 years and 3 months. During this time, they held a solo concert for 12,000 people at the Yokohama Arena on October 22, 2023. They were a group capable of standing in an arena even before they went viral.

ME:I is an 11-member group born from "PRODUCE 101 JAPAN THE GIRLS," but they emerged victorious from a pool of 14,000 people, the largest in the program's series. There are over 13,000 people who applied and were not selected. The "people who didn't get their turn" mentioned in the latter half of this article refers to these 13,000 people, for example. What the program was doing, in short, was compressing the run-up. It concentrated the selection of 14,000 people and several months of exposure leading up to the final episode into 11 people.

When you line up the run-up periods of these eight groups, even for imase, who had the shortest, it was a year and six months. The starting points are all different. The day they picked up an instrument, the day they made their first post, the day they debuted, the day they auditioned.

But no matter where you set the starting point, the conclusion that not a single person made it from zero remained unchanged.

TikTok is a Dash Mushroom

To sum this up in one sentence, it's this:

TikTok isn't finding talent that hasn't done anything yet. It's providing a massive boost to people who have already been running hard for a long time. It's amplifying them.

In the old music industry, there was a waiting line. You sent in a demo tape, went to auditions, joined an agency, played repeated joint gigs, and once your attendance numbers grew, a label would sign you, and finally, a single would be released. This line was long, and the number of people who could even stand in line was limited.

What TikTok broke was the 'order' of this line. The line itself hasn't disappeared. imase was standing in the line for a major debut. AKASAKI was in the line for releasing four singles, and the four members of Monaki have been standing in the same way until the age of 33.

Even if some people stepped out of line, not a single person stopped running. It's just that, while they were in line, their speed suddenly became supercharged.

That's why 'If you go viral on TikTok, your life will change' is only half true. It's half. The door is certainly open. But to get that Dash Mushroom, you have to be running in the first place to be able to grab it.

People who are standing still can't dash.

What I found most convincing while researching these eight groups was that the speed at the moment they hit it big corresponded entirely to the length of that person's run-up.

The fact that Monaki was able to secure three Zepp venues in four months is proof of this. The fact that M!LK was able to carry their viral success to the announcement of a 160,000-person tour, and that tuki. was able to stand on the Budokan stage for her very first live concert with an audience, are all examples of how their run-up—the things they accumulated before that dash—paid off in different ways.

From the listener's perspective, the story so far looks like this: even if the person you are currently supporting seems to have 'suddenly appeared,' it probably wasn't sudden. Before you found them, they had been building things up for years, and it just happened that the first video you saw was the one that reached your recommendations.

Try scrolling back to the very first post on your favorite artist's account. You can usually see their run-up. They often look completely different from how they do now, which is actually quite interesting.

From a producer's perspective

From the standpoint of looking for talent as a business, I think this is where the way of thinking changes.

Until now, 'scouting' meant finding someone who hadn't been discovered by anyone yet. That was the value. But now, TikTok does the discovery process for us. Moreover, it's faster than we could ever search, and the pool of people is incomparable.

If that's the case, the next people we should go to meet are those who 'didn't succeed the first time.' People who already have the skills and the experience, but whose turn hasn't come yet. These people won't appear unless we go out and look for them.

The reasons are different for everyone; some had circumstances that made it impossible to continue, and some are working different jobs now. At the very least, they are a demographic you won't encounter just by browsing TikTok.

What Kazuyoshi Sakai's 'Second Chance Audition' did was exactly that. Without that project, the four members with an average age of 33 would never have won the TikTok Grand Prize.

The spark was accidental, but it was no accident that they brought four people to a place where a fire could start.

I believe there is a very deep, untapped layer of this in Japanese entertainment. People who quit being idols, people whose bands broke up, people who left training schools but never made it to the stage. The next ten years will likely be defined by whether or not we can provide them with another chance to shoot, a song to shoot with, and a place to land when they hit the mark.

Until next time.

Keke Asahi.

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