How TikTokker Emmy Hartman graduated to pop star

“I think any strong reaction is a good thing,” artist development exec Talya Elitzer says.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩

“STUPID BIG TEETH” was probably stuck in your head before it even came out, and that was on purpose. —Kate

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Introducing EMMY. Photo: Adam Victor Martin/Instagram

If you’ve come across Emmy Hartman on TikTok, it’s probably because you saw her fangirling to Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license,” or telling The Hollywood Fix her “good friend” Bryce Hall shit his pants at McDonald’s, or maybe reluctantly letting you know that yes, she was the crying girl from the viral 2017 video filmed after getting a ticket while driving. But true fans also know Emmy for her singing voice: stunning covers of songs from artists like Madison Beer punctuate her otherwise charmingly chaotic content on the app. 

These videos inspired many comments suggesting the creator pursue a music career, but it was an intern at Godmode music, a Los Angeles artist development company, who put her name forward to Talya Elitzer (who you may remember from our interview with her in October.) Thanks to Elitzer and producer Nick Sylvester, Emmy released her first single, “STUPID BIG TEETH,” under the name EMMY, last Friday.

“To be honest, to find someone or to encounter someone who has a following on TikTok who wants to make music, that's pretty common at this point,” Elitzer tells me in a phone call shortly after the release. “But for me, what was really interesting was that Emmy particularly, I just love her whole vibe. There are plenty of kids who have followings on the internet, and she is one who really has a point of view and is really an artist.”

Despite this, when Emmy first teased a snippet of the single, it didn’t get the reaction you might expect. For as many people who were excited about the bubbly tune, there were just as many whose exhaustion with the TikTok-to-musician pipeline came to a head in her comments. 

This didn’t bother Emmy. Instead, she leaned into the criticism. When one commenter wrote, “It’s giving Glee vibes,” Emmy replied with a video of her dancing to the snippet in a Cheerio’s uniform. Others were tired of how much she was posting the song—so she promised she’d only be posting it four more times that day. 

Elitzer tells me “STUPID BIG TEETH” is just the first in a line of new music coming from Emmy. In this interview for paid subscribers, Elitzer breaks down the delicate process of introducing a TikTokker to a potential music career, the “STUPID BIG TEETH” songwriting process with Sylvester and Amy Allen, and how they deal with the backlash against TikTok musicians.