“Babydoll” by Ari Abdul is RIAA Gold, certified in five countries and past 600 million combined Spotify streams, and it exists because a producer’s mom suggested two college business students make a song. Abdul recorded it on a whim in 2021 at the studio where her best friend Thomas LaRosa interned, watched it go nowhere on TikTok, then posted a sped-up version in December 2021 and woke up to record-label emails. This is pop’s most productive accident, start to finish.
Who convinced Ari Abdul to record Babydoll?
In 2021, Arianna Abdul was a marketing student from South Brooklyn with zero music training and a private catalog of grunge songs she was too scared to show anyone. Her best friend Thomas LaRosa, whom she had met during her first year of college, had just landed an internship at a local recording studio. Neither was a music student: “we didn’t go to school for music at all... we were actually both studying business, I was doing marketing,” she later told the Fource to Speak interview series.
The push came from an unexpected place. “His mom was like, ‘Why don’t you guys make a song?’” Abdul told Enfnts Terribles in her earliest post-breakout interview. She was skeptical, telling Thomas some version of “I don’t sing... who’s gonna listen to it?” But she showed up anyway. “I always thought my voice was too deep and no one would ever want to hear me sing, but that day we just went for it,” she recalled in her Wasserman Music bio. The song was finished with Thomas and his younger sister Isabel LaRosa as co-writers, a family credit that would later matter enormously to both careers.
Why did the sped-up version change everything?
The first act of the “Babydoll” story is failure. Abdul posted the original version to TikTok and got nothing: “no one cared, no likes, no comments,” she told Popternative. She kept posting anyway. Then, on a random day in December 2021, she uploaded a sped-up edit of the same song. The tempo shift did what months of posting had not. “The next morning I woke up it was so viral... I was getting emails from record labels,” she said in the same interview.
I went to bed as some girl who hung out with a friend and woke up with calls and emails.Ari Abdul, Enfnts Terribles
The official studio version arrived February 22, 2022. A deal with Slumbo Labs/RCA Records followed, and Abdul dropped out of college. The sped-up edit was not a gimmick bolted onto a hit; it was the mechanism that created the hit, the same tempo-edit physics The Ring has documented in Dutch Melrose’s release strategy. On Spotify today, the sped-up version is actually the bigger track.
What has Babydoll earned since?
The certifications tell the same story in metal and paper: RIAA Gold in the United States, Abdul’s first-ever certification, plus Gold in France (SNEP) and New Zealand (RMNZ), Platinum in Poland (ZPAV) and Silver in the UK (BPI). Wikipedia’s cited figure of 200 million combined streams has long since been lapped; Kworb now shows the two versions at more than 600 million together, the anchor of a catalog that has passed 947 million total streams.
The song failed for months. The edit succeeded overnight.
The pattern the industry keeps missing
“Babydoll” never touched an official singles chart. No radio campaign built it, no playlist committee anointed it, and its writer had never sung for anyone before the day it was recorded. It went Gold anyway, the streaming-first certification path The Ring has traced before in the story of NUMB, another Gold record that started as a rough clip posted to TikTok rather than a label rollout, and in our broader look at how streaming-era artists actually go Gold.
The difference is that Abdul was not even trying. There was no artist project to promote, no bio, no team, just a business student, an intern, and an encouraging mom. Five years later she headlines tours on three continents and crossed 1 million TikTok followers in April 2026. The accident became a career, and the career, by her own account, became a love: “over time, I’ve truly fallen in love with just making music.” The next chapter, her self-titled debut project, is the first one she planned.