Ottawa’s Chrissy Spratt could easily be the poster child for a positive view of diversity and multi-culturalism in Canada. Though she’s garnered more than 6 million followers across all platforms (more than 4 million on TikTok, and a million-plus each on YouTube and Instagram) with her covers of predominantly Afrobeats music from Nigeria, she comes from a mixed family of both Lebanese and Armenian heritage. Back in 2017, she was featured on the song and in the video for Canadian rapper Peter Jackson’s “Vacation,” and in 2019 they opened for Snoop Dogg on several dates.
Back then, Spratt was trying to establish her own career as an R&B/pop/dance singer-songwriter. Then the pandemic hit in 2020. From that point, and for most of the next four years, knowing that she couldn’t follow the traditional path of creating a following through live performances and record releases, she decided to focus on building a following first. Doing covers seemed to work best.
“I started posting covers to YouTube, that was my platform before TikTok,” she says. “YouTube was all long-form content, and TikTok made everything short-form. When I moved to TikTok, I was just recycling a lot of the content that I was posting on YouTube, but I was chopping them up into smaller clips. I had so much content that I was posting on TikTok: I was posting five, six posts a day. TikTok was all about consistency and a specific niche, so the algorithm can understand who you are, what you’re about, and what kind of fans you’d like to push that content out to.”
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Chrissy Spratt song “Call On Me”
It took only a few posts before her page started blowing up with comments, compliments, and requests. She was surprised to find that many, if not most, of the requests were for a genre she just wasn’t very familiar with.
“They were songs in the genre of Afrobeats music, and I didn’t know it at the time,” says Spratt. “I just thought the music was really good, and some of the songs were very popular. So, I would learn the songs and post them specifically to TikTok. At first some of the songs were in English. Then, as more requests came in, they started to get more complicated. Next thing you know, I started to basically learn these songs in a whole other language. I was learning the songs line by line. I would read the lyrics and listen to the original artists. That’s how I would get the pronunciation and the dialect on point, and it really just took off.”
Afrobeats, Spratt determined, would become her specific niche. “I think my TikTok page had just passed a million followers. Just from doing popular covers,” she says. “[Then] this one specific artist who’s very big in this world, Kizz Daniel, re-posted one of the covers I did. The song was called ‘Cough.’ That video got 19 million views. Nineteen million views? That’s insane!
“I just kept taking the requests, and for a whole year or two, that’s all I was doing. TikTok blew up to 4 million followers, and then Instagram [followed suit]. Everything grew together, but TikTok was the main source. Instagram also grew to a million followers, and I only had maybe 40,000 followers at the time. So, within one year, I grew to a million on Instagram. It was in that time-period that I met the team that I’m currently working with. They saw me online and reached out to me.”
Now Spratt is signed to Hi-Way 89 Entertainment, helmed by Camillo Doregos and Ikenna Nwagboso, with her debut EP, Maybe Next Time, out Aug. 22, 2025, and a six-date Canadian tour launching a week after that. Her single “Call On Me,” released July 17, 2025, offers a thrilling blend of R&B, dancehall, Afropop, and amapiano, and features fellow SOCAN member Nonso Amadi and Serøtonin, both of Nigerian origin.
While Spratt had already earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at University, she also took a course in interactive multi-media at Algonquin College. She says, “It definitely helped in how to use a camera properly, because the TikTok videos I was filming, I wasn’t doing it on my phone, I was using a professional DSLR [Digital Single-Lens Reflex] camera, just because it looked so crisp, and has that blurring effect in the background. Going to school to learn multi-media design was very helpful. I learned how to work the camera, I learned how to edit with Adobe Premier Pro, I learned how to colour-correct. I learned the basics, and it did help me a lot with the visuals.” Could she have mastered growing her platforms without the extra schooling? “I think so,” she says. “I just think it would have taken me more time to teach myself.”