Jolene Burns Wins the UK Again at TikTok LIVE's Music on Stage

TikTok publishes the size of its own stage. In its first year, 2025, Music on Stage generated more than 8.2 billion impressions, produced more than 230,000 posts under the #MusicOnStage hashtag and drew more than 1.4 million viewers to its Global Finals, by the company's count. The 2026 edition, announced on August 13, drew music creators from more than 20 regions, had the British singer-songwriter Cat Burns hosting its EMEA and Americas Global Final on September 18, and offers its winners recording, distribution and promotional support through SoundOn, TikTok's music distribution and artist-services platform, along with performance slots at TikTok LIVE Fest, the All Things Go festival in New York and the Breakaway Carolina festival. In the company's announcement the host called it "TikTok LIVE's biggest global music competition," and nothing in the numbers argues with her.

For the second year in a row, the United Kingdom's number one on that stage is a singer-songwriter from the New Lodge in north Belfast. Jolene Burns won the UK in the competition's inaugural year and finished third in the world, a result Tinsel reported in July and that Moxie Media Marketing, the Texas company that represents her, has stated on the record since. This summer she won the UK again. At the Global Final on September 18 she finished fifth in the world, according to the final standings posted by Burns and Moxie, and the field she came through was drawn from more than 20 regions.

A single title in a format like this can be read as a good week: the right song on the right night, a crowd that turned up, a rival who didn't. A second title, 12 months later, against a fresh field and on a stage that has grown its ambitions, needs a different explanation, and the explanation is a method. The man who built that method around her, and the company he built it with, are the subject of a companion piece. This one is about the singer.

Burns grew up in the New Lodge, the cluster of tower blocks in north Belfast whose residents are the subject of The Flats, the documentary by the Italian filmmaker Alessandra Celesia. The film had its world premiere at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen in 2024, where it won the festival's top award, and in 2025 it took the George Morrison Feature Documentary Award from the Irish Film and Television Academy, according to its distributor, Icarus Films. Burns appears in it, and she wrote original songs for it. When the Sunday World profiled her in June 2025, the paper described a Belfast woman who had written songs for a powerful new documentary and was now pursuing the dream of becoming a singer-songwriter. That is where the Belfast press dates her breakthrough as a writer, and it is the work that, as the Belfast Telegraph reported in August, brought her to the attention of the American company that signed her.

The songs arrived after a long apprenticeship in the machinery of televised singing. She reached the bootcamp stage of The X Factor in 2011, one of a group of Northern Irish hopefuls that year. In 2015 she sang "Prayer in C" at the blind auditions of The Voice of Ireland and turned the coach Niall Breslin's chair, joining his team. The Belfast press lists Britain's Got Talent among her appearances as well. Those rooms teach the thing television teaches best, which is how to sing through instant judgment and then go home and keep writing. She did that for more than a decade.

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"I'd stood on every stage that has a red buzzer attached to it," Burns says. "Then I put a phone on a stand in my living room and sang to 40 people, and it was the first gig that ever felt like mine. Nobody was deciding whether I got through. People were just staying, and then they came back the next night and brought somebody with them. You can hear a room breathing on a live, even when the room is spread right across half the world and it's two in the morning somewhere. Somebody types that they've had a rotten day and you sing them something for it, and that's the whole job, really."

The room that changed the arithmetic was her own. Burns started going live on TikTok from home, singing to whoever came in, and the format fit her in a way the audition circuit never had. There is no edit and no second take on a live stream. The audience is in the room, typing, and the performer either holds it or loses it in real time, night after night. A singer raised on auditions turned out to be unusually good at holding it.

The staying turned into standings. At TikTok LIVE Fest in 2025, the platform's competitive season for live creators, she finished first in her region and 12th in the world, as Star magazine reported in March, out of a competitive field the magazine put at roughly six million creators from more than 45 countries. Star described the broadcasts that got her there as nightly digital concerts, performed from locations ranging from the Caribbean to the United States. She described them in terms of geography. "You're not just performing for views. You're building real relationships with people in Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Africa — places I've never even been yet. And they're showing up every night for you." On what the run felt like from the inside: "It felt like a world tour happening inside my phone," she told the magazine. "Every night was a different country. A different crowd. A different energy."

That autumn, in the first Music on Stage, she took the UK and finished third in the world, at a Global Final TikTok staged in London on September 27 with Sam Ryder as host. The loyalty a live room builds is the kind that has started to carry creators off their platforms and into legacy media, and in a competition where the audience's votes count, it is a large part of the game. The audience she assembled one evening at a time from a flat in north Belfast is the audience that put her in the top three in the world, and then went back a year later and won the UK again. This year's run, by Moxie's count, drew 1.7 million votes in her favor and gifts from more than 4,700 different supporters.

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Moxie Media Marketing entered the picture around the same time. The company, run by Kenneth W. Welch Jr. from a base north of Houston, describes itself as a platform that gives independent artists production, distribution and promotion, and it operates the Global Talent Billboard Directory, an artist platform it launched in October 2025. By its own account, it flew Burns to Aruba to record three songs and shoot three videos with island producers, and it has since taken her to Antigua and Jamaica for shoots, the Belfast Telegraph reported. Welch, who is also her fiancé, told the paper what he heard the first time: "Her magical voice is so unique. She is a true prodigy. She is self-taught and self-created."

The August coverage in Belfast carried a harder story than a career profile, and it is worth being exact about who reported what. Roisin Gorman's exclusive in Sunday Life on August 9, and her report in the Belfast Telegraph on August 12, said that Burns had landed a US record deal with Moxie after coming through a coordinated online hate campaign that included death threats serious enough to involve police and lawyers. The emphasis was the outcome rather than the ordeal. The Telegraph's first line described a singer who "has overcome online hate after landing her dream record deal," and Burns gave the paper the only explanation she thinks is needed: "I've been so focused on my career... I've just stayed focused and that's why I'm succeeding." On the deal she was equally plain. "I've taken the record deal with Moxie Media Marketing and I'm going to stay with them."

The papers also put a figure on her reach: more than 270 million views for her videos across Moxie's platforms, by the company's count. That figure is Moxie's. The standings are TikTok's: first in the UK twice, and top five in the world both times, in the two years the competition has existed.

What comes next is already on a calendar. Recording on the first of two albums begins within weeks, the Belfast coverage reported, with soulful songs written for the first record and upbeat, empowering ones for the second. They will be cut in a studio Moxie built for her in Texas, which the company says is now complete. The same coverage reported that producers who work with Pitbull have asked to work with her, that she is playing with musicians who have recorded with Christina Aguilera and hold Grammy Awards, and that a tour is planned for next year with the Hollywood Bowl among the venues. The tour follows a Las Vegas show in February at The Space, an invitation-only night that Moxie says had every seat taken and standing room claimed half an hour before the first song.

Welch measures the ambition in the size of the room. "We want to see her on the big stage in front of 100,000 people," he told the Belfast Telegraph. "We think she is going to be a number one superstar around the world. We are looking to push her global, which we have been."

"People keep asking me if the second one was easier," she says. "It was harder. The first year nobody knew who I was and I had nothing to lose. This year I had a title to hold onto and half of Belfast watching, and I wanted it more. I went back to the same stage a year later and did it again, and nobody can take that off me. Where I'm from you don't get handed a second go at anything, so I wasn't going to waste mine. The chat that last night was half Belfast accents, and that's the bit I'll keep when the rest is a blur."

The final has been played. At the Global Final for her half of the world, hosted by Cat Burns on September 18, the singer from the New Lodge finished fifth in the world. Two years, two UK titles, two top-five finishes in the world. Her account of the whole road, she told the Belfast Telegraph, is already in the songs: "Now I have written every part of my journey into my music." The first of those records is next.

Sources