TV Girl and the TikTok Effect
By Jenna Barr
TV Girl’s biggest songs are more than a decade old, but TikTok has turned the San Diego band into one of the most-listened-to acts on Spotify. As of early November, TV Girl has 24.6 million monthly listeners, ranking No. 329 in the world on the platform, and “Lovers Rock” has reached 1.9 billion streams.
The band’s debut album, French Exit, came out in 2014, followed by Who Really Cares in 2016. Both are steeped in the sample-heavy indie pop of the Tumblr era, and Spotify describes its sound as “hypnotic pop.” In 2022, TikTok began pushing songs from both albums, including “Lovers Rock,” “Not Allowed” and “Cigarettes Out the Window,” onto charts in multiple countries.
The growth has carried into live shows. After TV Girl sold out New York’s Terminal 5 in October 2023, it added a second night at the Knockdown Center. A year later, the band sold out Dublin’s 3Arena on a world tour that also made its debut in Australia and New Zealand. At Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut on Oct. 9, 2023, tickets were just $30.
The audience has changed along with the numbers. Many attendees at those shows knew only the “TikTokified” hits, and the energy spiked when those songs played. Some longtime fans have pushed back online, and TikTok creators regularly post variations of “I miss when TV Girl wasn’t TikTok music.” Spotify’s “fans also like” list, which includes Eyedress, Mac DeMarco, Jordana and Mitski, shows the band’s place in the indie scene.
Since 2024, listener numbers have grown from 21 million to 24.6 million, and “Lovers Rock” has nearly doubled from the 1 billion streams it had then. Lead singer Brad Petering has said he feels “surprised and lucky that people care,” and that catering to a TikTok audience would go against what made the music appealing in the first place.
The newer music has had a quieter reception. Grapes Upon the Vine, a gospel-influenced album, arrived in June 2023, and Petering has acknowledged that it wasn’t received as well by fans as the band’s earlier albums. A mini-album with George Clanton, Fauxllennium, followed in December 2024.
On Nov. 6, 2025, TV Girl appeared on “Incredibly Blind,” the lead single from producer Monster Rally’s album Echoes of the Emerald Sands. The track features vocals from X-Cetra, the obscure girl group whose voices TV Girl also sampled on “Summer 2000 Baby,” the band’s most recent release. The song marked its first anniversary on Nov. 6. Petering said in 2024 that he had begun conceptualizing a new album, though it was still a long way off.
