Alexandra Kay Plans on Going From TikTok Star to Country Radio Chart-Topper

Sitting on a couch her Midtown Nashville apartment, Alexandra Kay makes a bold prediction: She’s going to reach No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart. 

“I truly believe my song ‘Straight for the Heart’ will be my first No. 1 at country radio,” she tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast. “And I have no problem saying that, and I say it on stage all the time.”

Long before she was named to Pandora’s 2025 Artist to Watch: Country and CMT’s 2025 Next Women of Country lists, Kay built a career as an independent artist. After getting dropped by a label in 2019, she poured herself into social media and amassed 8.5 million social media followers with the help of her “coffee covers” videos in which she sings a cover of a familiar country song — “Everybody loves ‘90s country,” she notes — while preparing a coffee drink. 

She boosted her original music by leveraging the popularity of her coffee videos. After a cover song gave her “a lift in the algorithm,” Kay would immediately post an original song. “That’s how I ended up getting millions and millions of streams of my original music,” she explains.

Even though she built an online following and toured as an independent artist, Kay needed help hurdling the next obstacle: country radio. BMG’s BBR Music Group/Wheelhouse Records will release her second album, Second Wind, on Oct. 24, and she’s betting the label group, home to Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson, can take her career to the next level. BMG, she says, has “one of the best country radio teams in the game right now.”

Country radio, though, is dominated by men. Women account for just seven of the 60 songs on the current Billboard Country Airplay chart (eight if you include Tate McRae, a guest on Morgan Wallen’s “What I Want”). The top female track on the chart, Wilson’s “Somewhere Over Laredo,” is No. 17. 

Kay is undeterred. “I really don’t let that bother me at all, and I don’t let it slow me down,” she says. “Because my experience is going to be what God intends for me, and I know for sure that I’m not going to have my foot off the gas.”

Listen to the entire interview with Alexandra Kay, which covers the opening of her coffee store in her hometown, her non-stop social media prowess, her relationship with her fans and the trick to writing a song everybody can relate to. Use the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart, Podbean or Everand.