I probably noticed her 1st from YouTube. YouTube sometimes tries to mix in one or two new singer(s) in its suggested playlist. Understandable from the point of view of expanding the viewer/listener’s horizon, also potentially promoting another singer or song.
曾經你說 (KKbox, YouTube) is probably one of her most famous song as original singer. You can find the song at the Apple Music: 曾經你說 and Spotify: 曾經你說
Other notable song 匆匆那年[HD] Covered by Seammy 趙乃吉 If you attended college in China, this is very familiar scene and feeling. Naiji was 26 then:
“（这是高考时录制的歌曲） 马上高考了，祝各位考生一切顺利！不枉这些年经过的喜悦与悲伤，憧憬与难忘致我们最难以忘怀的青春…（ps：本人已26岁，真的没有要高考）” (I believe it was recorded in June or July 2016, so Naiji was probably born in 1990)
It appears she didn’t kept her social media or video channels up to date, for some reason. I am not sure if she is active singing now. But her songs and MV left impressions on me.
Ayen何璟昕 He Jing’xin (earlier she used Ayen Ho for her English name) is very special and quite talented artist, musician and social media influencer (自媒体作者 zi mei ti zuo zhe). She was born in Guangdong Province and she lives in Beijing metro area now.
Sometimes people used the term “北漂(Baike, Wikipedia) bei’piao”。From what I observe, Bei’piao is quite common for musicians and some other artists, because Beijing is also China’s No. 1 culture center, in addition to be the capital of the country (the political center, and many good universities including the 2 leading ones). Here is an example of Shanghai singer who is also 北漂ing.
Live Performance
2025.10.18 CCTV 15 《15号音乐房子》 20251018 大概不到五分钟左右：漫步人生路；25分钟不到一点：祝福（粤语版）；44分钟左右：人生何处不相逢（粤语），中间有一小段国语版 最真的梦。这里有粉丝团的剪辑版（微博）。Technically speaking, CCTV show is recorded not live. But I will categorize it as live as I think it still has a lot of pressure.
(Update 08-01-2025) I found an old video of Ayen何璟昕 on Bilibili – 56红人馆 第204期 南方姑娘何璟昕北上追音乐 小清新曲风书写心情. You may need a Bilibili account in order to watch. Personally, I have a Bilibili account which is tied to my WeChat account.
(Original June 2025) Here is my earlier post on her. The article was probably too long for a person who heard about Ayen何璟昕 the very first time. Below is an updated and a shorter version.
Also Bilibili: 南 屏 海 滩 it’s a combination of 南屏晚钟 (YT) and 上海滩。There are some similarities between those two song’s melodies.
Most of the video links go to Douyin 抖音. How to watch Douyin without an account? Basically, you need to complete the Chinese version of captcha (slide the shape/the object into its place). Also, you dismiss the phone number pop up after that. Btw, this is her Douyin live URL/address. Note I haven’t watched her live show yet, because before today 07-30-2025 I was under impression that we need a Douyin account in order to watch any live show. My assumption could be wrong.
Update 10-26-2025: also recently I happened to find another tip that get to DY on the mobile browser on the phone. That is the so.douyin.com DY’s own search engine. It only works on the phone though. It seems DY uses some “innovative” tricks on the front end.
(Original) I think this Douyin short video showed her skills very well. The song is 抖音《素顏》許嵩、何曼婷【動態歌詞Lyrics】Ayen was doing a cover, but it’s not a very straightforward cover. She puts efforts and creative thoughts into it. She has two versions of herself in the video.
And she did dance too. Ayen used to joke she didn’t know how to dance. I don’t know. But I know she learned dance in last few years. Personally I felt her dance move is good. Note dance is not her strong suite.
Top songs Ayen covered, many covered with acoustic guitar. This is a tough task, because I like many of her covered songs. I have created many playlists on YT or YT Music. Here is one example.
I noticed a QQ Music playlist created by a friend is also very popular – much more popular than my list – understandable from the point that in mainland China there are a lot more listeners for both Cantonese and mandarin songs, compared to the listeners outside CHN.
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Lullabies 催眠曲
Btw, for lullabies, my recommendation is to listen to them from a MP3 player, not from the phone. Because ideally, we don’t want to look at phone extensively before bed, and also, we want to keep the phone outside bedroom – for less distractions and better sleep. I learned this trick back in 2012, from the CEO of Arch Coal my employer at the time. But I had to admit I failed many times and recently I am more serious following this best practice. A related thing I started to do is to use Apple Watch to track my sleep.
That being said: here is my YT playlist for lullabies. I have a similar PL on my iPod Nano I use for sleep or before sleep (we are talking about lullabies or songs during sleep, right 🙂 I got the songs from Ayen’s Cover songs on the U drive.
This is my favorite lullaby right now 11-25-2025
A related thing I started to do recently is to use Apple Watch to track my sleep – after the suggestion of my 15-year-old. Previously I used Fitbit sleeping tracking for a while, but I haven’t used the Apple Watch sleep tracking since its debut in 2020 (I switched from Fitbit to Apple Watch a few years before that), mainly due to the fear to facing the reality of looking at my sleep data. Oh well, not a really good excuse and also let me back to the topic.
Similar singers
I saw some people commented on YT that that Hong Kong based 王菀之和陈洁丽的风格有点像Ayen何璟昕。我觉得读者可以自己去做判断。
PS:后记
How to show your support? Here is Ayen的店 at Taobao淘宝。She has her own branded guitar and other peripherals (附件，周边）in addition to her top selling Ayen翻唱經典歌曲集.
She is from Beijing. I am guessing she is born in 1980s: aka she would be about 40 now (baidu 钟晓京超女几岁了). I came across her at Bilibili, 钟晓京翻唱苏芮80年代经典歌曲《跟着感觉走》. This is the song that I listened in high school and college. || Update 09-01-2025: Jamie mentioned she was at 3rd grade in year 1993. Assuming she was 8 then, she was born in 1985.
Bilibili – 钟晓京Jamie: you will notice her English songs got most playbacks. This is understandable because that’s also her strength: she graduate from Beijing Foreign Studies University 北京外国语学院 and passed 英语专业八级。
YT – 钟晓京Jamie: right now she listed all English song she sang (as cover 翻唱）。Personally I think she can put up her Mandarin and Cantonese songs there too.
Douyin 抖音: 钟晓京Jamie：北京歌手，毕业于人大附中、北京外国语大学英语系，英语专业8级。曾就职于国际唱片公司。直播内容：中英粤及其他语种经典歌曲，流行、摇滚、爵士等多种风格。This is the platform that she is most active (I believe). Probably for many short video creators Douyin is also most lucrative too – we got to eat and and sometimes bring bacon home. She probably started her solo/creator career about 5 to 10 years ago, and this again confirms this old saying: many roads lead to Rome.
WeChat: 钟晓京Jamie (she does go live 直播 on WeChat sometimes, at least once a month). She mentioned the WeChat audience is slightly older than the audience at the other platform (Douyin).
(Update 07-7-2025) During this morning’s WeChat live, Jamie made an interesting observation, that is over the time, people change the way they consume the pop music, and also due to that, they change their preferences of the type of pop music they listen to as well. Nowadays people tend to listen to music that’s easy, vs. say Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you”. Because a lot of times people listen to the music as a background (noise). I will put more precise words from her if possible.
Btw, the price to ask her to sing a song is about 500 Yuan (what they called “520” stands for I love you in Chinese), or $70. It’s not too expensive, but it’s not too cheap. I imagine Tencent (WeChat owner takes a cut, probably at least 30%?). Also, Apple is probably not taking a cut here.
(Update 07-11-2025) Jamie commented on WeChat live that 小斗 (she meant Douyin, because WeChat and Douyin are competitors on the video/live front), is already in 工业社会，by that she meant the analytics for broadcaster (live show host), while WeChat is still at 农业社会。Good analogy. I guess that’s one reason the singer I like (you probably know whom she is, if you read enough of my blog posts), also goes live on Douyin sometimes. A second reason “why someone goes live only on Douyin”, I can think of, is there’s an exclusivity between the show host and Douyin (Byte Dance). Note this is nothing new, as we seen similar things on Spotify or Apple in the west.
Keep in mind I am 2nd class citizen there as I don’t have an account with Douyin. To log into Douyin, we need the Douyin app, but the app is only available in the China app store (including HK).
Jamie also commented YT: 翻唱的歌拿到的广告费大多数要交版权费。一个矛盾是如果是自己版权的歌，一般流量就低，也就没啥广告费。
My comments: Jamie is a straight shooter. She would say what’s in her mind. That obviously a double edge sword: it has both pluses and minuses because usually people don’t want to hear anything negative about them.
PS:
I wrote another two singers, and this is the 3rd of the singers series, the first two are: Liang Jingru 梁静茹 aka Fish Leong and Ayen 何璟昕. We know Fish Leong learned quite a bit from the famous Jonathan Lee (李宗盛), and Ayen何璟昕 (links to Wikipedia, full disclosure: yours truly made some contributions to her Wiki page recently), is also quite unusual in her career path, she grew interest in music in middle school and high school, but she chose to attend a college in Beijing, major in digital media and arts (Engineering degree), and she launched her music career during/after college.
The key are: you got to love that thing, and you probably need to be decently good at it. The latter also depends on the the competitive landscape and the business overall of that field: for example, I consider myself a decent programmer, but not a 10x dev, but I still made a decent living because the field is fairly lucrative (at least in my 24/25 years career, this may change due to AI etc). But music industry is more competitive. So were the creator and short video platforms.
