Martina Lynn is a 21-year-old singer from Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She started on TiKTok for fun in grade eleven (2019), when she was 17. She says her first post soon reached a thousand views, which she thought was crazy, but then it kept on going up by thousands. Martina mostly releases covers, but she has posted a few original recordings.
If you were to judge Martina by her YouTube channel, you would think that she was a one-hit-wonder. One of her covers, Queen’s Love of My Life, has 4.4M views in three years. Her next most popular song, a cover of Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved, has a comparatively paltry 379K views over the same time. Here is Martina Lynn’s Love of My Life:
The song is sung over a piano karaoke instrumental, which brings it all down to Martina Lynn’s singing, and clearly, a lot of Queen fans appreciate the cover. Rubartubar captures the tenor of the Youtube comments when he writes: “You sing like an angel. Freddie would be looking down, crying and smiling, whilst listening to your amazing voice.” Puddytat observes that she expected Martina to have a light and high-pitched voice, so she was pleasantly surprised to hear such rich and deep singing.
With Martina Lynn, her YouTube channel is deceptive. Under the Love of My Life video she even comments: “I’m gonna get back on that YouTube grind, I promise.” The thing is, Martina Lynn is part of a relatively recent phenomenon where social media stars can have a massive presence on TikTok, & to a lesser extent Instagram, while barely registering on YouTube. Take Martina’s TikTok short video of Taylor Swift’s Love Story (13.1M views, 2.6M likes) which isn’t even posted on her own YouTube channel.
In 8 years, Martina has posted 16 videos and 7 shorts to YouTube, while she has posted 312 short videos on TikTok. On YouTube Martina has 63.6K followers, largely due to the popularity of her Queen cover. On TikTok she has 887.3K followers. Clearly there is a massive viewership for TikTok’s short videos and you can be a massive star on TikTok while having a lower profile on other social media platforms.
The reach TikTok can give social media creators is particularly pertinent now that Western governments have TikTok under scrutiny on account of issues related to data safety and Chinese control of the company. If TikTok were to have further restrictions imposed on it, it would have a significant impact on a large number of social media creators.
Were TikTok to be severely circumscribed, Martina Lynn is in a comparatively good place. Even though she clearly gives more attention to her TikTok account compared to her YouTube channel, her presence on YouTube is not insignificant. Many artists would love to have the 4.4M views that she has for Love of My Life, and would do everything they could to grow their YouTube fanbase.
Interestingly, Martina told Mix 96.7 (a Windsor, Ontario, local radio station) that she was so shy as a kid, that she had to close herself in her room before she could sing.
Fans of Martina Lynn’s music might prefer it if she posted more full-song videos on YouTube, but for the moment she seems to be concentrating her energies on TikTok. Given that Star Ngage ranks her as the fourth most influential TikToker in Canada, this isn’t especially surprising. If you would like to see more from Martina, you can subscribe to her YouTube channel or follow her on Instagram or TikTok.