the guide to getting your song TikTok viral
Brooke and Jess are the not-so-secret duo behind new music success
We’ve all seen a TikTok dance go viral when a new song is released, but who creates them in the first place?
More often than not, it’s the same duo behind a dance routine: Brooke and Jess aka BrookieandJessie.
Wearing their trademark tracksuits and sunglasses, the pair have created many of the TikTok viral dances to your favourite songs.
With 2 million followers on the short-form video platform, Brooke and Jess are the girls in glasses you need to know.
Remember the ‘jiggle jiggle’ dance to the rap from Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date interview with Louis Theroux? That was them. It’s now been named the top US trend on TikTok’s fifth annual ‘Year on TikTok’ report for 2022.
Amelia even joined the girls to do the dance after it became a success. And if that’s not impressive enough for you, the dance became a feature on Fortnite. It also earned the girls a shoutout on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon when Shakira did the dance.
The routine was created initially on Jess’ solo account before they set up their joint account and began making dance routines together.
Their success saw the duo employed by Netflix (and their 28.8M TikTok followers) to create a promotional dance video for season four of the sci-fi smash hit series Stranger Things and then First Kill.
More recently, Brooke and Jess danced to Meghan Trainor’s new single ‘Made You Look’. The video racked up more than 500K likes, and Meghan herself even made a video to the dance and tagged the pair with dance credits in the caption. The video has 3.7M likes.
When Lewis Capaldi made his music comeback earlier this year with ‘Forget You’, Brooke and Jess also helped the song grow on TikTok. The singer later joined them for a video but struggled to keep up with the dance routine and simply bopped along in the background.
Their choreography took the platform by storm again when they danced to Lizzo’s song ‘2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)’. The girls posted some of the stars who recreated their dance to their Instagram page, and names included Lizzo herself, Dani Minogue, Jojo Siwa, Lorraine Kelly, and Stephen Mulhern.
But how did they start out?
“We were just messing around in our lounge”, the pair told Echo News. “I was making pasta at the time and Jess played the Jiggle Jiggle song and it was so catchy that we were bopping around to it.
“We didn’t plan on dressing up or anything, so we put the glasses with the hoodies on, because we didn’t want to make an effort, and that seems to be our brand now”.
@brookieandjessie but here we are x
♬ Malibu - Miley Cyrus
Brooke and Jess are both professional performers in musical theatre, have been in pantos, and are graduates of the Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom, Surrey.
And it’s not just TikTok that they’re big on, the duo also have an Instagram account, YouTube channel, and their very own merch line where they now sell the hoodies they are always wearing in their videos.
Another creator who has been influential in the TikTok dance world is Nifè aka @itsjustnifee who created the Love Nwantiti dance.
Love Nwantiti is a song by Nigerian singer and songwriter CKay.
Nifè’s sound to her original dance has racked up 642.3K videos being made to it and the video has 1.8 million likes. As a thank you to Nifè, CKay then brought the TikToker on tour with him.
That’s not all she’s done. Nifè also choreographed the dance to Antigoni’s ‘You Can Have Him’ and was later featured in the music video.
TheLady aka @4ladycapri also made a viral dance to Camidoh, Mayorkun & Darkoo feat. King Promise’s Sugarcane and was later brought out on stage at Ghana Party In The Park which took place at Trent Park in Enfield.
These are just a few examples of the amazing ways in which musicians give credit to the choreographers and creators who had a huge impact on a song’s success.
There are some artists, however, who are accused of creating a song or specific lyric just to go viral, as it usually results in high charting and more sales.
Taylor Swift did it well when she released her latest album ‘Midnights’ and created the #antiherochallenge to promote the leading single.
Initially on YouTube Shorts, the trend was quickly picked up on TikTok which is commonplace when something goes viral on one platform for it to quickly pick up traction on another. It’s since racked up 34.4M views on TikTok and ‘Anti Hero’ has been at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for five weeks running – so it’s safe to say this was a success.
The beauty of TikTok (and the randomness of its algorithm) means it’s not just new songs that trend. An old song can pop up and trend at any time and even Meghan Trainor herself couldn’t explain why her 2016 song ‘NO’ started trending recently, but she went with it!
TikTok dances are no new thing and have been around since the app first launched, but it’s exciting to see the new and innovative ways in which artists and creators are collaborating – and that artists are making sure to give credit to those who coined the dance routine which helped make their song a success.