Canada’s Tate McRae tops the Billboard Emerging Artists chart. Forever known as the pandemic artist, meaning her song You Broke Me First was released during lockdowns while gaining traction. Before signing with RCA she was dancing competitively. Moving into the artist world, she began posting songs she wrote on her YouTube channel. As destiny would have it, the songs went viral.
Tate says, “I was like, really mad, wrote this random song in 20 minutes and I was like, ‘Here we’re putting it online. My family hated it. I hated it. We were just like, ‘O.K., put it out there. But then something unexpected happened. It ended up going viral overnight and it was super weird,” says Tate. “So after it hit, like, 30 million views, I was like, ‘I should do this again!'”She laughs, “So I kept on writing songs every week and signed with RCA [Records] and the transition slowly started to happen.”