Pop stardom used to run through radio programmers and playlist editors.
These days it can run through a single actress dancing in her kitchen. That is roughly what happened to Jamie Miller this week, when his new single Babydoll jumped from TikTok curiosity to a genuine chart story, thanks largely to Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Miller is not new to this business. The Welsh singer-songwriter finished third on The Voice UK in 2017, competing on Jennifer Hudson's team. He built a real following after that, and his 2021 single Here's Your Perfect has pulled in over a billion global streams for his catalog, with that single alone accounting for more than 600 million of them.
He has since signed with Republic Records, a label that also counts Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and the Weeknd among its roster.
Babydoll is his newest attempt at a follow-up, and for weeks it looked like a modest TikTok trend and nothing more. Miller had been promoting the song on TikTok and Instagram by two-stepping to the track in video after video, and lately the people dancing alongside him have gotten a lot more recognizable.
Hewitt started it. She was the first famous face to join him, using the song in several TikToks and posting a video of herself playing it on the piano. Dancing With the Stars alum Julianne Hough and Off Campus breakout Antonio Cipriano followed with their own versions of the same two-step. Hough and Cipriano have both since danced alongside Miller in their own posts.
Hewitt's enthusiasm reached a point where fans started asking questions. People have started wondering if she's on the record company's payroll, given how often the song kept showing up in her feed. Her answer, when pressed, was blunt. "People have asked me, 'Why are you putting it in all of your videos, besides the fact that it's addicting?'" she said, brushing off the suggestion of a paid arrangement.
That's the pitch, basically. A genuinely catchy song, repeated enough times by someone with real reach, until it stops looking like promotion and starts looking like fandom.
The numbers back up the momentum. Babydoll has already hit number one on iTunes and was sitting at number four as of this week, according to Showbiz411. That is a real jump for a song still building its streaming footprint, currently sitting around 4 million streams so far. It is a fraction of what Here's Your Perfect eventually racked up, but the growth curve is what matters right now, not the raw total.
Miller's own platform numbers explain why one celebrity fan can move so fast. He carries 4.1 million followers on TikTok and 1.2 million on Instagram, a sizable base on its own. Add Hewitt's much larger following, and the math starts to look less like a coincidence and more like an accelerant.
There is a specific irony sitting underneath all of this. Dominic Fike has had his own song called Baby Doll as a major streaming hit all summer, though Miller's record is not a cover. Two nearly identical titles, both circulating heavily at once, makes for a confusing search landscape and, oddly, more attention for both.
Whether Babydoll becomes Miller's actual crossover moment is still an open question. Here's Your Perfect took time to build into the streaming giant it eventually became, and Babydoll is only weeks into its run. But the pattern looks familiar. A song gets adopted by a TikTok dance, a celebrity leans in harder than expected, and radio and chart attention start following the noise rather than leading it.
For Miller, the timing matters. His 2024 album Long Way Home did not chart on the Billboard 200, so a genuine hit right now would mark his first real commercial breakthrough since Here's Your Perfect. Coverage of the Babydoll surge is still thin compared to the volume of TikTok chatter around it, which usually means one thing in this business.
The formal write-ups tend to arrive right before the real chart movement does.
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