Alex Warren on 'Ordinary' and His Viral Social

It’s almost pointless to attach numbers to Alex Warren ’s smash single “Ordinary” because they go out of date so quickly. The song passed a billion streams on Spotify alone in September and, as we write this, is well past 2 billion overall. It was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks and for 13 weeks in the U.K. — the longest-running chart-topper of the decade in that country — and reached No. 1 in more than 20 countries all over the globe. It is also the No. 1 song of the year on Variety’s Hitmakers Top 25.

But although Warren is technically a new artist and the song seemed to come out of nowhere, neither is really accurate. The 25-year-old Carlsbad, Calif. native began posting YouTube videos at the age of 10 and co-founded the TikTok collective Hype House in 2019, which became