• Joey Birlem is a 17-year-old American musician, model, influencer, and social media personality.
• He became famous on Musical.ly, now known as TikTok, and has a massive following on YouTube and Instagram.
• He has won local skateboarding competitions and went on tour with Jacob Sartorius in 2017.
• He has a net worth of approximately $500,000 and is popular on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.
• He is rumored to have been in a relationship with Maddie Ziegler in 2017.
Contents
- 1 Who is Joey Birlem?
- 2 Early Life and Education: Growing Up in Los Angeles
- 3 Career Beginnings: YouTube and TikTok
- 4 What exactly is Musical.ly (TikTok)?
- 5 Becoming a Star: Dancing, Growing Up and More
- 6 Personal Life: Does Joey Birlem Have a Girlfriend? Where Does He Live?
- 7 Body Measurements: How Tall is Joey Birlem?
- 8 Net Worth: How Rich is Joey Birlem?
- 9 Online Presence
Who is Joey Birlem?
Born on 29 May 2002 under the air sign of Gemini, in Los Angeles, California, Joseph “Joey” Mathew Birlem is a 17-year-old American musician, model, influencer, social media personality and former skateboarder. A child prodigy who was already an adept singer at the age of six, Joey slowly gained recognition when he joined the online application Musical.ly (now known as TikTok). Using his initial popularity, he started posting various content on YouTube and Instagram, on which he also has a massive following.
While he may have become famous as a musician, he toned down tours and song releases to focus on his career as a content creator. Nowadays, he mostly focuses on prank videos, Q&As and other popular formats.
Early Life and Education: Growing Up in Los Angeles
Joey was raised by his parents under the bright lights of Hollywood. Not much is known about his dad, but we do know that his mother’s name is Jen Valdez, which confirms the notion that he does have Latin American roots. He grew up in a loving family, alongside four siblings – two brothers, Kashius and Scotty, and two sisters, Sophia and Bella.
Even as a young child, Joey displayed an obvious affinity for music – whenever someone was watching MTV or VH1 in the living room, he would try to sing along. It became evident that his talents were far above the level of his peers, thus his mother signed him up for singing lessons at which he excelled, and slowly started making a name for himself. Birlem’s other passion was sports. He would always root for the US national men’s basketball team, but ultimately chose skateboarding as his path in life. He became good in a short time, and even won some local competitions. As for his education, Joey is still attending an unspecified high school in Los Angeles, from which he should matriculate in 2020 we don’t know if he will go to college.
Career Beginnings: YouTube and TikTok
The starting point of Joey’s rise to fame can be traced back to January 2016. Together with close friend Tayler Holder, he created “Joey and Taylor”, a channel which would eventually feature them singing, pulling pranks or simply chatting. They amassed 100,000 subscribers in less than a year, but ultimately grew apart and deleted their collaborative channel, sometime in late 2018, according to their latest video together on Tayler’s channel.
Back in September 2016, Joey decided to kickstart his solo career by sharing his work with the world for the first time; family and friends encouraged him to promote himself, so he finally took the plunge. Shortly after creating his YouTube channel, he uploaded “Get To Know Me Better… (First Video)”, in which he shared personal information and various facts about his pastime activities. Around the same time, he began posting short clips on TikTok (Musical.ly) of himself lip-syncing to popular songs. People already knew of him from his collaboration with Tayler Holder, so he quickly became one of the more popular faces on the network.
What exactly is Musical.ly (TikTok)?
People often get confused when they see Musical.ly and TikTok mentioned together, mostly because only one of these two brands exists. Musical,ly was initially founded by Luyu Yang and Alex Zhu, with headquarters in Shanghai and offices in California. The app was launched in April 2014, and was intended for people to record themselves lip syncing, and create short, looped videos. Editing options were innumerable, and people really enjoyed this new type of social media-entertainment hybrid. I
n November 2017, Bytedance, a company which owned rival app TikTok, bought Musical.ly from the original owners, and promptly decided to merge two apps into one. This merger is frequently a source of conversion and leads to many mistakes in nomenclature. Today, TikTok is one of the fastest growing apps, mostly used by teenagers and artists, and is even predicted to overtake Instagram in the mid-2020s.
Becoming a Star: Dancing, Growing Up and More
As time went on, Joey decided that he could spice things up a bit with dancing. Instead of just singing in TikTok and Instagram videos, he would also flex and perform elaborate moves.
Thus, all of his talents were on display, which resulted in a major boost in popularity. In 2017, he went on tour with fellow young sensation, Jacob Sartorius, and performed as the opener at multiple venues during the Sartorian Summer Send-Off Tour. This made him a true star, as he also became an influential figure on Facebook and Twitter. In late 2017, he embarked on the Weekend Rush 2017 tour as the main act for the first time, with support by Mark Thomas. Critics doubted his ability to carry a whole concert on his own, but he did not disappoint and managed to attract even more fans than before. Nowadays, he mostly dabbles in modeling, and flaunts his wealth on Instagram.
He owns at least two Lamborghinis, and garners a lot of attention with his stylish outfits. Given the fact that he’s just 17 now, he’s spreading his influence into many areas. On one occasion, he stated that he wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Personal Life: Does Joey Birlem Have a Girlfriend? Where Does He Live?
Currently, there is no information about Joey’s relationship status. Mostly because he’s young, he’s managed to stay out of controversy and allegations. For unspecified reasons, people thought Joey was gay at the beginning of his career.
yup, issa lambo pic.twitter.com/t1wq70Nqsp
— Joey Birlem (@joeybirlem) August 28, 2019
He did nothing to either confirm or deny these allegations, so everyone was waiting for an answer. In 2017, however, things changed. Popular actress and dancer, Maddie Ziegler, tweeted at him in a flirtatious manner. Joey seemed to enjoy this approach and engaged in a conversation which moved into their DMs. Everyone was shocked by this turn of events, because Maddie was in a relationship with Jack Kelly, who is also a social media star. In November 2017, she went live on Instagram to inform everyone that her Twitter account was hacked, and that there was nothing to talk about. Not everyone bought her excuse, but it kind of made sense for some.
Joey himself was unconvinced, so he publicly called her “a bad liar”. Some thought a feud would start between the two, but that’s the last we heard of them as an item. As of October 2019, Joey is probably single and lives in Los Angeles.
Body Measurements: How Tall is Joey Birlem?
Joey Birlem is 5ft 11in (180cm) tall, weighs approximately 132lbs (60kgs), and has a slim figure, as evident by his vital statistics of 38-30-10, for chest, waist and arms respectively. Both his hair and eyes are dark brown.
Net Worth: How Rich is Joey Birlem?
Whenever you see an influencer flaunt their lavish lifestyle on social media, it’s easy to think that they’ve bought it all. Have you ever wondered how affluent they really are? In this case, we’re not talking about a fraud. Authoritative sources indicate that Joey Birlem has a net worth of approximately $500,000, as of October 2019. This indicates that he really has bought several cars and a new apartment. Obviously, he obtained most of his wealth from generous amounts of social media promotion, and various types of content. Given the fact that he’s still going strong in terms of thinking of ways to reach audiences, it’s quite likely that he will see an increase in his net worth soon.
Online Presence
As an influencer, Joey sees social media and content sharing platforms as the root of his success. Thus he runs successful profiles on all the major networks. His first YouTube channel, “Joey and Taylor” had well over two million subscribers, but was ultimately discontinued, and all the videos have been set to private for some reason – it’s unclear whether there was a dispute between the two or not. His solo channel is still steadily growing, as it has over 200,000 subscribers. Birlem is also a popular figure on Facebook and Twitter, with 160,000 and 220,000 followers, respectively. In addition, he is also a superstar on Instagram and TikTok, with 1.5 million and 1.9 million followers, respectively.
