Photo by Jason Goodrich
For someone as imaginative as Bailey Spinn, there are few things in this world that would stop her from creating. Stuck in her hometown of Centreville, Virginia, during the COVID-19 lockdown, she took isolation as an opportunity to feed her passions, manifesting an immersive TikTok series inspired by her love for music. Before long, her content had reached millions of people, showing that nothing is impossible when you take a leap of faith. Now, she’s onto the next level. With the release of her first single, she’s blasting a message of empowerment the world needs to hear and building an even deeper relationship with the audience who saw her spark from the very beginning.
“I was always a big music girly and loved content creation,” Spinn recalls. “When I was younger, I’d try to get Instagram followers. I loved singing karaoke and playing a lot of different instruments.” As Spinn grew older, her artistic pursuits evolved with her. “Content creation kind of started as an accident for me, but it helped me build the confidence to move on to an even bigger passion that I’ve had since I was a kid.”
If you’re a TikTok regular, you might be familiar with POV videos, which place the viewer in unthinkable situations—from seeing what your soulmate sees to living in a world full of demons. Spinn, inspired by this subgenre, decided to put her own twist on it. Her series, “Everyday You Wake Up in a Different Year,” was the first to get her a million views. Inspiration for these clips often came from Spinn’s undying love for music. “I would go and listen to throwback playlists,” she says, “and kind of look for keywords that really spoke to me in the songs, or an idea of something I could use to make a POV.”
The POV skits she recorded for TikTok did more than just connect her to the world during the pandemic—they were slowly becoming her meal ticket. When Spinn kept coming home with new clothes she bought using her small TikTok payouts, her mom had questions. “‘Where are you getting these from?’” Spinn recalls her mom asking. “‘You better not be doing anything inappropriate on the internet for money!’ I was like, ‘No, I’m just making some little videos with an Amazon ring light in my room.’”
Despite the encouragement from a growing number of followers and the money she was bringing in, Spinn ran into the same personal challenge every viral internet personality eventually faces—people overlooking the substance of her content to criticize her personally. “A lot of the time, I’m afraid to show what I really look like head to toe because people are really body shaming on TikTok,” she says. Spinn also received backlash on videos of her song covers, which hit a little closer to home. “They said, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Never sing ever again, delete this video.’”
Visualizing what critics looked like behind the screen helped Spinn deal with the negativity. “It’s very easy to send something from behind your phone when you’re sitting on your couch,” she says. “I put myself out there every single day, and you have zero videos in your account. You’re hiding from the fact that you’re a hater.” Spinn’s advice? “It’s hard to ignore, but don’t look. Once you post a video, reply to the people who are nice, but don’t sit there going through and through. Don’t try to fight the [haters], there’s no point in giving into them. It’s just people projecting their own insecurities and you don’t have to listen.”
Armed with newfound confidence gained from her success on TikTok, Spinn realized she could pursue her musical dreams. “If I can post myself online every single day,” she says, “what’s stopping me from singing in front of people?” The rest unfolded seamlessly—she met a vocal coach and started playing electric guitar, covering artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Cassadee Pope. Once she started writing her own songs, she honed in on the rock aesthetic and fell in love. “I got a bounce of a song that was so incredible,” she says. “It was really upbeat and reminded me of Avril Lavigne, and I was like, absolutely. This is what I’ve been looking for.”
From that point on, Spinn’s trajectory has soared. She just released her first single, “Romance Is Dead,” an anthem about how dating nowadays is literally the worst. “Nobody will take you out on a real date,” she says, exasperated. “They won’t even pay for the meal. I’ve never gotten a bouquet of flowers. When people always ask me, ‘Why are you single?’ This is why. This is my answer.”
Spinn didn’t hold anything back with her first tattoo, going straight for one on her hand. The tattoo is of a rose, which represents her middle name and family. Spinn’s approach to tattoos is one that isn’t afraid to make mistakes. Materializing her journey of self-discovery in real time, she already had dozens of tattoos by the time she found a style she wanted to stick with—ethereal items like cherubs, keys and crosses in black ink. “I’m just gonna cover [the old ones] up, you know, get another tattoo,” she says nonchalantly. “It just gives me a reason to get more pieces.”
Another of Spinn’s hand tattoos sports a set of angel numbers, “222.” “I’m very obsessed with angel numbers,” she says. “And then when I said I was gonna drop out and move to LA, literally every single day afterwards, multiple times a day, I started seeing 222. On license plates, on alarm clocks, on my phone. When I looked it up, it said, ‘you are making a correct decision in life.’”
It’s clear that the girl-from-the-suburbs-turned-TikTok-sensation won’t have a problem keeping her fans around. She’s built a platform on being herself, and her music is only an extension of that. Two years ago Bailey Spinn would never have expected to go from making comedic skits in her bedroom to emulating one of the singers who set her heart on fire, but with her unflinching drive, there was really no other way it could go. If you keep your eyes on her, you might find that her next POV is right on center stage.
