Dance Up & Comer of the Month Tiffany Day Turned Her Worst-Streamed Song Into Her Biggest Hit
Billboard ·
"American Girl" was included on her fantastic album Halo released in April. Her latest single, "Meant To Be," is out today (Oct. 13).
Tiffany Day made a deal with herself. While on tour last year, her drummer’s wife had lent Day her Dyson Airwrap, the six-in-one hairstyling tool that retails for a hefty $650. Day wanted one too.
“I told myself, ‘You can’t just buy that Airwrap; you have to earn it,'” Day says. “Earning it for me was posting on TikTok for 30 days in a row. I told myself that it didn’t even matter how the content did. I didn’t care about the numbers. I just cared about the fact that I did it for 30 days.”
The motive behind this plan wasn’t just elevating her haircare routine. “The truth is,” she continues, “I was on the phone with my manager before those 30 days and was really crashing out, because I had just released ‘American Girl.’ I loved that song, but when I released it, it was the worst streaming debut in the history of my career. The engagement was so bad that I just felt embarrassed.”
Her manager, Sammy Seaver of Mutual Friends, talked Day through it, telling her that she’d never really treated social media like a real job. She’d often post a few days in a row, then abandon the pursuit. This time, they decided, she’d treat the task like a real nine-to-five. Day sat down, made a social calendar, and executed the plan. By the end of the month she’d gotten 50,000 new TikTok followers and multiple label deal offers. Last fall, she signed with Broke Records and bought herself a refurbished Airwrap. “American Girl” is now her highest streaming song on Spotify.
While the refurbished Airwrap later broke, Day is now a big enough star that the company just sent her a new one for free. When we speak with Day, she’s in the car on the road between shows in Detroit and Minneapolis, as she’s currently touring behind her fantastic album Halo , released by Broke Records in April. Beyond this sold out headlining tour, her recent shows include June’s Electric Forest, an August show opening for Illenium at Red Rocks and a September slot opening for Skrillex in Chicago. Today (Oct. 13), Day releases her latest single “Meant To Be,” a collaboration with singer/songwriter Glaive, who’s also supporting Day on her current tour.
“This year has been the most overwhelming of my life, and I also never thought that this year would ever come,” she says. “I never thought there would be a year like this, you know what I mean?”
Day has been a buzzy name since 2017, when a video of her singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into a well in Italy went viral. ( The clip now has more than eight million views.) Born in Toronto and raised in Wichita, Kansas, Day says that if this viral moment hadn’t happened, “I would have studied biomedical engineering and become a researcher or something.”
Instead, she moved to Los Angeles to simultaneously attend college at Loyola Marymount University and pursue music. (“At first it was really hard to balance my career and college together, but then it almost became like college became an escape from the music industry,” she told LMU’s student newspaper in November of 2020.) As she attended classes by day and made music at night, she also got into the SoCal dance world. Her first big festival was EDC Las Vegas, an experience that brought her further into the electronic music scene and opened up a special love for bass music.
“Dubstep just clicked,” she says. “After that, it became this never-ending rabbit hole where I felt so inspired to quite literally study what sounds made me feel what emotions and why certain things make you feel the way they do, especially when it comes to notes or textures.”
Despite this draw to hard sounds, her own music was existing largely in the indie pop and R&B lanes. Her first official single came out in 2018, with a flurry of additional independently released songs and EPs leading to the release of her 2024 debut, Lover Tofu Fruit . That 10-song project streamed well and brought Day on the road for a 10-city headlining tour, but it didn’t feel totally aligned with what she really wanted to make. By the time she’d graduated from LMU, she was at a low point.
“I was miserable making music,” she says. “I didn’t want to be perceived as… the only word I can use is lame. I just felt lame.”
A friend suggested that if Day was sincere about quitting music, then she should treat her next album as her last. That premise sparked something for her. “I got a feeling of, ‘If I’m going to treat it like my last album, I’m going to do what I want, and it doesn’t matter how the album performs. It’s just about making it the album I’m most proud of and if it performs like s–t, then I’ll go work a nine-to-five at Aritzia.”
Released on April 3, Halo has in fact performed remarkably well. (Its lowest-streaming song has 1.9 million streams on Spotify alone, with the highest streaming tracks having upwards of 10 million.) “American Girl,” the song Day was at one point embarrassed about, is the album’s most streamed track, with nearly 13 million Spotify streams.
The project is vastly more electronic than anything else in Day’s catalog, with songs like “Doit4me” and “Pretty4u” presenting heavy, glitchy, hyperpop productions that Day’s voice weaves through like a ribbon. The project places her among a wave of next-gen electronic artists like Ninajirachi, 2hollis and Jane Remover, all of whom are currently making left of center dance music with strong pop tendencies.
“I would say that I’m in this new new generation of hyperpop/electronic artists,” Day says, “But it’s also cool because I really do feel like I’m paving a distinct sound that pays homage to a lot of artists I grew up loving that aren’t necessarily part of that new collective.” She cites Halo songs like “Same LA” and “It’s Not Like That Anymore” as encompassing the same kind of euphoria as Illenium’s soaring productions.
“I used to go to sessions where they’d be like, “What have you been listening to?’ and all I could pull up were heavy dubstep bass tracks. It’s always been in me where even as a consumer, I just love electronic music. It was just a matter of how bridging the gap between the pop people knew and loved with the electronic music that I know and love. That’s what Halo came to be.”
Signing with Broke has helped power this creative freedom, with the label among those that reached out after Day’s 30-day TikTok sprint. “What I said to a lot of labels I met with around that time was, ‘I’m on a boat and heading to an island. I know which island I want to be on. I know the directions to get there. All I need is a better motor. I don’t need a co-captain. I don’t need the boat to be bigger. I just need a better engine. I feel like [Broke] understood that and got it the most out of everyone I chatted with.”
All in, the days of feeling lame are well behind her. She says opening for and meeting Skrillex were among her pinch-me moments of the year, as was selling out three back-to-back nights at The Hall at Elsewhere in New York, along with selling out the rest of her curent tour. An honest reflection of her interior world and most sincere musical interests, she says she’s stoked to show Halo “to anybody who asks me if I make music. I feel like I’ll continue feeling proud of this project for a long time.”
The song that Day was initially embarrassed about the engagement on and which is now the highest-streaming track from Halo .
Day’s newest song, a collaboration with Glaive that’s out today.
A song Day says contains the same feeling of euphoria as a lot of the work by Illenium, an artist she opened up for at Red Rocks in August.
Day’s current North American headlining tour extends through late October, after which she travels to Europe for a November/December run. Her final show of the year is the Dec. 30 festival Temper in San Diego, where she’s on a lineup that also includes Zeds Dead, Crankdat, Sara Landry and Ninajirachi. In February, she tours Australia.
While she advises that “I’ve gotta hold my tongue” regarding the rest her plans for next year, she assures that there’s “a lot of fun stuff planned,” with 2027 set to outpace even this breakout year. Whatever is next to come, with now both an Airwrap and hit album in tow, Day’s next moves are sure to look and sound fabulous.