Eleanor Doyle
BBC Newsbeat
Riyah Collins
BBC Newsbeat
Published
Here's a test. Finish the sentence.
"I'm looking for a man in finance..."
If your brain added "with a trust fund. Six-five. Blue eyes", congratulations. You're one of the millions of who's been earwormed by Megan Boni.
That's the viral song sample poking fun at the concept of an "ideal man" she recorded back in April that's taken over TikTok in the weeks since.
Megan, better known as Girl on Couch shared the video with the caption: "Did I just write the song of the summer?"
Forty million views later, it's inspired hundreds of remixes and parodies, with high-profile names including Billie Eilish's brother Finneas making their own videos based around the 19-second clip.
DJs, brands and even Singapore's Ministry of Defence, external got in on the trend.
Now Megan's hoping to storm the charts with a single she's recorded alongside superstar DJ David Guetta.
But despite what she says in her TikTok, tells BBC Newsbeat she's not actually looking for a tall banker with a deep wallet.
"I doubt we would work", she says.
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The 27-year-old New Yorker tells Newsbeat the idea for the meme came out of dating app fatigue.
Bored of complaining about being single, she started jotting down some lyric ideas in her notes app.
"Dating apps are making dating so much more impossible because they're really raising everyone's standards," Megan says.
"So I was just trying to make fun of girls like myself who complain about being single but then have this laundry list of impossible needs."
Some people complained that the track objectifies men, but Megan brushes off the accusation.
"I think it's so funny when these men are like 'If a guy wrote a song like this about a woman...'
"Guys write songs about women all the time," she says.
"It is a joke. I didn't think a man with these criteria existed."
Image source, Megan Boni
While Megan says she "couldn't be less interested in dating", she also says she's not too bothered about launching a music career.
Universal Music Group - the label behind some of the world's biggest stars including Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Ariana Grande - has offered her a publishing deal.
It means she can make some money off royalties from the song, which she says hasn't so far been as profitable as some people assume.
"I have made money from it, just not through the uses on TikTok," she says, which anyone can feature for free.
Megan now has more than a quarter of a million followers on the app and tells Newsbeat after she posted the original video, "in the span of a week, my life was flipped upside down".
She says she was also offered a deal to make a full album but decided to turn it down.
"I was like: 'what makes you think I can write a song? What makes you think I could write an album?'" she says.
"I'm such an unserious person.
"I don't fit. I'm just not interested in writing music."
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Instead, she's happy to just let the song have its moment online.
"The sequel's never as good as the original," she says.
"There's no way that I come out with another two-second song and it blows up as big so I'm not too stressed about doing that.
"So for the summer, I'll ride the wave of the song and I'll party."
It's working out pretty well so far for Megan, who recently flew to Las Vegas to perform the track alongside David Guetta and US dance duo The Chainsmokers.
"I keep thinking I can't get any more excited," she says. "And then new stuff just keeps happening."
Once the hype dies down, she says, acting and comedy are what she really hopes to pursue.
"It was never my dream to be a musician," she says.
"I'm so lucky that this happened but I'm really trying to use it to do something that I love.
"My dream would be to be on Saturday Night Live. That's the goal."
She admits she feels a "little bit bad" about her overnight success though.
"Some artists try to get a record deal their whole lives and I was just sitting on my couch," she says.
"But that's how it happens, it's how the internet works. It's wild."
Related Topics
- Social media
- TikTok
- Viral posts
- Dating
- Dating apps
- Online dating
- Music
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