Harry Daniels Has Always Been The Main Character

If there’s one person who knows Harry Daniels sounds off-key, it’s Harry Daniels. That’s the whole point of his viral videos. “It’s intentional,” the content creator says of his off-tune serenades to celebs like Charlie Puth, Anne Hathaway, and Vice President Kamala Harris. “I seek out entertainment value more than I seek out artistic merit.”

That doesn’t mean the 20-year-old, originally from Long Island, New York, is immune to aspirations to make music of his own. “I started producing songs when I was 12 or 13, but I was writing them since before I could even walk,” he says. “Even if it was just me mimicking what I heard on Radio Disney.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who’s found viral success, Daniels spent much of his teen years online, escaping into small online circles on Tumblr, Twitter, and even Build-A-Bear’s virtual world of Bearville. “I found my community there with my love of pop culture,” he says of his work on Twitter/X, where he repped Demi Lovato with a dedicated fan account following the release of her self-titled 2013 album. “I still have so many of my friends from back when I was a stan on Twitter.”

His stan account work soon diversified, with a teenage Daniels creating accounts for other faves like Selena Gomez, Billie Eilish, Lorde, and Fifth Harmony (RIP), though he didn’t always keep them for himself. At 13, he found an easy way to make money: by selling his accounts to fellow fans.

The hustle was simple. An artist would announce a single, and he’d quickly create a Twitter username using the single title, then sell the username for the highest bid. “Sometimes I’d make 200 bucks, sometimes I’d make 10,” he says of his work. “I didn’t care because I was 13, so I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m rich! I’m going to go buy an Urban Outfitters T-shirt!’”

Like most get-rich-quick ideas, it didn’t last long. “Interests change, priorities change,” he says. “I was making money from other things at that point. It didn’t pay enough for the trouble it was worth.” It also didn’t help that others caught on to his game: “The competition got involved.”

Still, he remained on social media, eventually leaning more toward Instagram and TikTok. It wasn’t until 2022, though, after he dropped out of freshman year of college as an undeclared major, that he cracked the formula to help him reach the stardom he’s always coveted — and it involved Sabrina Carpenter.

That was when I started to realize, ‘Holy f*ck, people are watching.’

Ahead of meeting the singer at a signing for her album Emails I Can’t Send, Daniels and his friends thought it’d be funny for him to go up to her and break out into song (“in a weird, post-ironic way”) almost like a bad American Idol audition. “It’s so over-the-top,” he says of his performance — an off-tune rendition of Carpenter’s “Skin” — in front of the Disney alum. He posted it to TikTok and developed the sound that people know him for today.

In the two years since that video, Daniels has amassed a following of 1.5 million on TikTok, most of it following a September 2023 encounter with one of his idols. “I always say Doja Cat gave me a career,” he says, noting that the “Paint the Town Red” singer allowed him to perform for her because she recognized him from the internet, even though he only had about 80,000 followers at the time. “That was when I started to realize, ‘Holy f*ck, people are watching.’” Today, that Doja video has 13.6 million views.

From there, it was a domino effect. “In the beginning, it was definitely very calculated,” he says of catching celebs outside press junkets and at CD signings. Sometimes, it was even by chance — at a grocery store (like Erewhon) or in a cafe. These days, he’s getting personally invited to red-carpet events. (Yes, that was him asking Ariana Greenblatt, America Ferrera, Halle Bailey, and more whether they’d choose “gay son or thot daughter” at the 2024 People’s Choice Awards.)

Despite his career highlights of the past year — including meeting Dua Lipa while singing her hit “Houdini”, and connecting with his fans at Lollapalooza — Daniels’ self-proclaimed “TikTok era” isn’t the end game for the budding musician. Next up: “The first singles era, then the EP, then the album and album two…”

The people who get it are going to get it, and the people who don’t get it ... I have my whole life to prove them wrong.

This new music isn’t far away. His first single, “I’m Him” — which he has sole credit on and plans to roll out on social media — was supposed to drop mid-September 2024, but Daniels decided he wasn’t ready. “I wanted to delay it so it could come with a music video,” he says. If all goes according to plan, the “hyper-pop meets trap” track will come out on Oct. 17 instead, amid spooky season. “It’s very Halloween vibes,” he says.

Regardless of what others think, Daniels is in the spotlight like he’s envisioned since childhood. “The people who get it are going to get it, and the people who don’t get it ... I have my whole life to prove them wrong,” he says. “I was always the main character of my own universe. If I was the main character in other people’s universes, it was just a bonus.”