The moment that changed everything for Melanie Herrera was not a viral video or a stroke of algorithmic luck. It was watching two women younger than her co-create a musical based on a Netflix period drama, post it to TikTok, and reach millions of people through creative initiative alone.

“The moment wasn’t coming for me,” she says. “I had to make the moment.”

Melanie is a content creator and a pop musician, and she keeps both titles active. She makes whimsical comedy videos and vocal warm-up content with her husband, Andrew, produces original music she calls “storybook pop,” and has assembled from those two overlapping practices a creative business that includes brand collaborations with major Hollywood names, a 4,000-member Discord community, a merchandise line, and a podcast, “The Warm-Up,” launching this month. The elements are varied, held together by one conviction: an entertainer does not owe anyone a single lane.

The most visible expression of that conviction is the “Nepo Baby Vocal Warm-Ups,” a comedic series in which Melanie and Andrew thread celebrity names into theatrical tongue-twisters performed a cappella to rhythmic clapping. The format has drawn millions of views and major collaborations, and it has also created a specific misreading that Melanie works to correct. The warm-ups are an entry point to her world, not the whole of it.

“It’s opening a gateway to the Melanie Herrera world,” she says. “It’s really hilariously combining so many elements that are part of who I am and what I do.”

‘I Felt Like I Wasn’t Special’: The Decade Before the Pivot

Melanie’s path to that conviction was not linear. She studied performing arts in college, left with her confidence diminished, and redirected toward screen acting because it seemed, as she puts it, “like it’s sort of naturally happening.” Music, which she had always wanted, required an independent self-direction she did not believe she was capable of. For years, she did not pursue it.

The explanation came later: she had ADHD, undiagnosed throughout college. The conservatory environment had compounded rather than accommodated her difficulties. “When I went into a performing arts program, my confidence took a huge hit because I lacked a lot of the skills to have the discipline that I needed,” she says. “I felt like I wasn’t special … I felt like I couldn’t go after my goals.”

During the pandemic, TikTok was filling with younger creators who built audiences from original work without institutional backing. The specific catalyst for Melanie was watching Emily Bear and Abigail Barlow co-create “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” on the platform. “They were fearlessly showing up on the Internet and offering and creating,” she recalls.

Melanie hired an ADHD life coach before receiving a formal diagnosis. “She really made me see that I was capable of self-generating and setting goals and going after things,” she says. The waiting was over.

The Coppola Family Unlocked a Format

The “Nepo Baby Vocal Warm-Ups” began modestly: short-form videos threading a few celebrity names into something between a tongue-twister and a musical joke. The early videos performed. Then the comments pushed them further.

“People kept commenting, ‘You should do a full famous family,'” Melanie recalls. “We just took it as a challenge.”

The Coppola family became their first long-form subject. That video accumulated what Melanie estimates at roughly nine million views, a number she half-dismisses before acknowledging. “For some stupid theater vocal [warm-up], [it] was pretty good,” she says. She had not seen anyone else do anything quite like it: theatricality, comedy, celebrity cultural literacy, and music, assembled into a recurring format performed in tandem with a creative partner.

The audience the warm-ups attracted overlapped substantially with her music listeners: millennial women, many of them former theater kids, drawn to a similar blend of wit and sentiment. Melanie cites Sara Bareilles as a tonal reference for her songwriting, a writer who navigates between theatrical influence and pop production. The crossover between warm-up viewers and music fans was lucky, she says, and also structurally coherent.

What the Discord, the Merch, and the Music Actually Cost

Melanie has a background in marketing, and it shapes the order in which she releases things. Music comes first; it is expensive to produce, returns little from streaming, and she treats it as a trust investment rather than a revenue stream. Merch comes after, adding a monetization layer to an audience already engaged with something she gave them. The Discord, a 4,000-member community built around crafts and audiobooks, is free, with a voluntary donation option to cover server costs.

“I think there can be value when you’re building a brand to have spaces that are just no barrier to entry,” she says.

Brand deals are her primary income, and she is candid about their economic reality. Around 215,000 followers across platforms does not make the pipeline automatic. “You still have to be putting a lot of energy into outbound pitching and forming relationships,” she says. She also pushes back against the assumption that sponsorships are a concession. “We do need to make a living,” she says, “and that means you do have to take brand deals.”

Her highest-profile collaboration arrived without a pitch. A member of a film production team who followed her account recognized the alignment between her content’s theatricality and the project’s subject matter: a film in which Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play members of a Neil Diamond tribute act. “It was just an organic thing,” Melanie says. Fit drove the partnership, not reach.

‘Funny Women Don’t Have to Be Silly Little Characters’

The concern Melanie names most readily is that her music will become invisible behind the format that made her known. In some brand conversations, she says, every proposed deliverable becomes a vocal warm-up, as though the rest of her output does not exist. A three-part storytelling series she posted about a piece of wood embedded in her hip for seven years accumulated approximately 2.6 million views across platforms. The warm-ups are reliable. They are not the whole picture.

Her response is a visual brand consistent enough to carry audiences across emotional registers. When she posted about a friend who had died, the content was not funny. But it occupied the same aesthetic world as everything else she makes, giving her permission to be serious without losing her audience. The underlying argument, about the full range available to women who built a following on comedy, is more pointed than her content register suggests.

“Funny women don’t have to be like silly little characters,” she says. “They can [be] beautiful and they can be sensitive.”

She and Andrew set a corresponding limit around their marriage: they produce content together, but the relationship is not the subject. “I really didn’t want to be like a social media couple,” she says.

Betting on What Cannot Be Automated

Melanie’s near-term prediction for the Creator Economy centers on AI. As AI-generated music and content multiply, she expects audiences to develop an appetite for something that cannot be produced at scale. “I hope that there will be a real hunger and a desire to have direct audience-to-creator connection,” she says, naming live experiences and concentrated digital communities as the formats most likely to matter.

“The Warm-Up,” her podcast with Andrew, is part of that bet, and also something more personal: her husband’s long-held vision of a resource for artists navigating the emotional reality of careers built on rejection and irregular reward. “There are a lot of podcasts that are like, ‘This is how you get an agent,'” she says. “There’s not a lot that are like, ‘This is how you continue to find joy and meaning in your life while doing something that is kind of knocking you down all the time.'”

That is the question Melanie has been working through for a decade, and the one she is now building a platform to explore.

“I want my world to feel like drinking wine late at night in a room with your really good friends,” she says, “where in one second you can go from cracking up [at] something so hilarious, you’re choking on your drink, to five minutes later you’re crying about your childhood trauma. That’s the energy I want.”

Photo credit: Carianne Older

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