There Is No Limit for C.Y. Ing

The singer walked away from pursuing a career in music in 2024. Now he’s ready to talk about why it was important to forge his own path.

Arman, @amb1tion199

When C.Y. Ing looks back on it now, there were several times he thought about quitting music. For two years he was a member of BAD KIDS, a scrappy music start-up made up of seven diverse musicians based around the greater Toronto area. On his own, Ing, too, was a solo artist, releasing music under the stage name C.Y. Ing, who had slowly started to gain traction on streaming. 

At his height, which he is still coasting on, Ing amassed over 26,000 monthly listeners, a feat that he is still incredibly proud of. But the music industry is a relentless grind and seeing other artists pop off around him as he continued to struggle to find his footing was discouraging. 

In the worst moment, Ing told me over the course of several interviews, music had become something unrelenting and exhausting. “Our collective produced some pretty successful hits. We had a couple of international hit songs. I was sitting at a point where I had some success,” he explained. “And I had hopes of growing to the same heights as these guys.”

Ing’s best friend, an antipop/altpop singer who records under the stage name kuiper, had begun to gain a large amount of popularity with tracks like “options” and “blood on the floor”, all of which passed millions of streams. Ing always believed that he and kuiper, who also started with a small listener base, would maintain “this friendly rivalry. I always thought that I was gonna blow up and we’d go back and forth and chase until we hit the millions,” he paused.“That never happened.” 

Instead, Ing watched as everyone around him began to find the success that he was chasing. As his discontent grew, Ing developed what he considers a “toxic mindset” by hyperfocusing at the numbers. The grass is always greener on the other side of success, and even though Ing was vastly improving as an artist and finding a core audience of fans, “it was hard to celebrate the wins when there was always pressure to hit the next milestone.” The benefits were not outweighing the difficulties. 

“You are never guaranteed anything in the music industry. You can post a million times a day,” he continued. “You can have posts blow up and it doesn’t guarantee that your song will do well. I ended up plateauing while everyone around me was doing well.” 

Eventually, his former manager sat him down for a talk. “He saw how much pain I was in at the time, “Ing remembered,” and he talked to me, not manager to artist but friend to friend.”

Ing’s manager was blunt in his assessment. “If you’re going to leave music, you’ve gotta do it with your own two feet and your chest held high,” he said. “If you don’t do that and you quit on bad terms then you’re gonna end up hating it forever.” 

“And that,” Ing said, “was what kept me in the industry.” 

Arman, @amb1tion199

Long before Ing decided to pursue music, he was just a kid growing up in Toronto, hanging out in parking lots, going to eat at McDonalds or playing Uno in tea shops with friends. “Those are the times that I cherish,” he told me. 

Ing’s mother is a classically trained teacher who received her doctorate in America before settling in Toronto. During our first interview, she was teaching a lesson in another room. 

When Ing was four, his mother placed him in violin lessons and then in choir. He was never a great student but the experiences seeded a deep interest in music. Down the line, he said, “it blossomed into something else.”

In high school, Ing began writing and uploading music to a SoundCloud page. “Those songs got lost to time,” he said. The music was often chaotic but conceptually they pushed farther than their ironic titles might suggest. The weirdest, like “Elmo Wants to Lick You” or “sussy cypher verse”, use humor and shock value as a motif to talk about anxiety. Other tracks like “Childhood Sweethearts” are bare bones with Ing’s voice accompanied by an acoustic guitar before unwinding into a 60s doo-wop beatbox. 

The turning point, Ing remembered, was when he decided that he was going to spend a few months focusing entirely on learning music. “The turning point,” he said, “was when I had a quarter life crisis and figured I would regret not giving music a shot, which led to me deciding I'd spend a few months focusing on music.” The result was his debut single “Rebound”. “That took four months to really hone and try to get right,” he said. “Looking back, it wasn’t perfect but it was a pretty big jump from where I started.” 

“I decided I was just going to keep grinding, learning how to get better,” he said. “At that time, I didn't know what I was doing.” But luck played a part in what happened next: First, he was introduced to kuiper after his friend sat next to him in math class. Second, he was invited to join a discord with other independent artists who would later become close friends of his. 

Being in a discord with so many talented artists was intimidating for Ing. As he tells it, “Imposter syndrome hit hard.” But he forced himself to get out there and start talking to people. Even when he’d join voice chats and hear artists comparing their stats or accomplishments, he chose to stick around and see who he could connect to. 

“There were a lot of other smaller artists who we found solidarity with and also larger ones, like aleebi, who a few us up north are still very appreciative of,” he remembered. “We learned a lot from each other and we decided it might be time to take this a little more seriously.” 

Under kuiper’s suggestion, a small group of friends that included Ing formed BAD KIDS. Together with Ing’s manager, the boys brought in other musicians like Danny Park, WIMY, shae, Rein, and DAYZ3RO. “It felt like a ragtag bunch of kids that had nothing to lose and were hungry to create something,” Ing explained. “It was supposed to be an outlet of emotions where art and people were put first and we could watch each other grow. That was the goal.” 

What Ing appreciated the most about BAD KIDS was the community it provided him. Music is often a solitary, lonely hobby and Ing knew this firsthand, having spent hours alone in his bedroom grinding out projects. But with Bad Kids, suddenly, Ing had a group of friends who he could share the journey with.

The community was more than just artists working together. They were close friends who truly supported one another. “We talked as people, not as artists. We’d play poker or a bunch of other games,” he said, “We’d have late night talks. It was a good community. It was a good time.”

“That really helped alleviate any negative thoughts that popped up in my mind,” he continued. “The thing about the music industry is that there will always be negative thoughts, but it will always be better with people.”

Ing only had a few people who he could turn to for support in the industry aside from the guys in BAD KIDS and, for a while, it felt as if they were on to something grand. Many of the members began to find success, some reaching millions of streams. 

Ing is perhaps most proud of the way the guys in BAD KIDS supported one another. “On a personal level, it was a way for all of us to foster a community and grow together,” he said. “We truly wanted to see each other grow and celebrate our successes together.” 

Rein Cabalquinto @reincabalquinto

Perhaps more than any of his peers C.Y. Ing never shies away from the theatrics of a ballad. You can hear this best on a lesser-known single called “Snowing in May”, a track released in 2022 that Ing believes solidified his sound. 

“Snowing in May” has “a charm to it that I think is very unique because it’s not a sound that you hear too much in the Western indie scene. It was inspired by my roots as someone who comes from the East Asian scene,” he explained to me. “Mando-pop ballads, K-balalds, that’s always been a part of my DNA. That’s where my early reputation as being a ballad guy came from.” 

These types of ballads are essential to understanding Ing’s artistry. He debuted with one, after all, and some of his best work, like “Still the Same”, are also ballads. But there is another layer to Ing’s artistry which he traces back to the summers he spent in Taiwan every year throughout his life, where Mando-pop infiltrated the airwaves and seeped into his mind. Many of the biggest names in Mando-pop, like Jay Chou, were skilled in creating big, sweeping ballads that Ing would later try his hand at. 

There is an old school, classic vibe to songs like this as Ing’s voice croons, sounding as if it’s from a different era. But the one that Ing says is “closest to my heart” is “can i call you baby?”. Released in June 2024, the song was based on a demo Ing recorded and uploaded to SoundCloud when he was in high school. The song’s creation reflected how Ing works best as an artist who draws inspiration from different stories to create new emotional narratives. 

“It shows how I’d extract what I like [from life experiences and media he watches], do some surgery and make something new,” he said. “It draws a lot of inspiration from the themes I really like to write about and that makes the core identity of who C.Y. Ing was. I never really write about anyone in specific. Perhaps someone might hurt me or break my heart. But the actual story or the thematics behind a song is never about one person.” 

Ing’s honesty is what always set him apart as an artist. He leads with vulnerability and a deep introspection. On Instagram, where he is most active, Ing writes candidly about battling anxiety and how it’s affected his artistic output or even the ability to live peacefully. While his most popular track, “image”, has a cool, casual air to it, Ing’s most valuable contributions come from this straightforwardness. 

“I think these are the types of themes that supporters of C.Y. Ing resonate with the most,” he told me passionately one night as we looked through his discography. 

Yet what Ing values the most in his favorite track “can i call you baby?” is the fact that it was made with people. “I was not capable of the baseline that WIMY played or the guitar riffs that Danny put in,” he said of the song’s process. “It meant a lot to me that they helped bring my creative vision to light. It was a song that meant a lot to me prior to recording, and they made sure my creative vision was met.” 

This is what leads us back to BAD KIDS’ demise, which in turn, contributed to Ing’s own retirement from music. 

Justice Gin @juszgin

By the summer of 2024, BAD KIDS had begun to run its course and the members were eager to break out on their own. Ing compares a similar effect to what happened with his artistry. “I was heading into a new life direction. I was starting grad school and that was exciting. [he grows contemplative here and pauses for a long period of time] I always knew in the back of my head, music wasn’t a stable career. And you have to work a lot to make it happen.”  

While Ing always believed that everyone who makes it “has to be a little bit delusional”, now he’s more circumspect. “Maybe I wasn’t willing to be that delusional,” he said softly at one point. “Maybe I didn’t want to put all of my eggs in one basket.” Ing still believes that anyone can make it if they work hard enough and if they’re delusional enough, but he maintains that isn’t a mindset he sees himself willing to give in to anymore. “I think having a Plan B made my music career inevitable to fail. All my friends who don’t have a Plan B - they only have a Plan A and if they don’t make it in music, they’re done. That extra level of desperation is what gets them over the edge.” 

“Having to leave that [the label] and go out on your own,” he said as he shook his head, “it’s daunting. It’s not like I was leaving behind my peers” – but the community that his friends had built over the past two years had faded. 

By the end of BAD KIDS, what Ing realized is perhaps what many of us realize as we grow up: You can never get back what you once had. Plans change. Our lives take different courses. And what fulfills you at 20 might not be as important as your real life begins to take shape. 

BAD KIDS was essentially never going to be what it once was. Ing realized, both with some sadness and resignation, that the ragtag team of rebels who made art together would likely never come together like this ever again. 

“It felt like everybody’s career was going to be their own again. And your success was going to be celebrated by you [alone].” He paused, as if he was self-conscious that this made sense. “You know what I mean?” I could sense that he was still trying to process it himself. 

Ing is assured that his decision to quit music wasn’t a sad thing: “It was just a natural evolution of where things were going. A simple cost-benefit analysis told me that perhaps it was time to rethink what music means in your life.”

But ending a pursuit for music came after a long battle with anxiety. Walking away was in part to relieve the intense pressure to make a living from art. Ing has lived with OCD for most of his life, but the burden of continuing as an independent artist added weight to his anxiety. “It didn’t make sense for me to keep burdening myself with a pipe dream,” he added.

Ing has never considered himself a religious person, but when the anxiety was the worst he turned to spirituality. He found comfort in scripture, particularly in the verse Job 1:21 which reads in part, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” 

Ing realized that to survive he would have to submit to the uncomfortable feelings of what came next. “I think, whatever I have materially in this world whether that be my accomplishments in music or my future job prospects or my iPhone or the roof over my head, I have it now but it’s God's right to take it away. I just gotta trust the process,” he said. “The more I thought about that, the more I was okay with whatever was causing my anxiety and leaving behind music. If I left it behind, then I could walk away in peace.” 

After BAD KIDS ended, Ing said, “we all went our separate ways. And I’m detached from them now.” It used to be that Ing would sit with the boys and strategize a marketing plan or produce music. But that changed after they split up. Suddenly, Ing was alone in his room again, strategizing by himself and realizing that the community is what made this meaningful for him.  “Artists who are larger than me have more to look forward to,” he explained. “But for myself – I had to figure out what I was gonna do.” 

Ing realized that he needed a community to find his listeners or to learn how to make things sound good. “People helped me understand the steps that I needed to take in order to give music a shot. But that’s just the technical side of things. There’s a whole other emotional side too,” he said. “My friends that I met in music were the ones who actually were the solution to the issue. The issue was that music is a very lonely journey.” 

He continued: “When I met guys like kuiper or Danny Park and we were able to sit in discord, grind music together, show each other music? Boy, was it fun. It was a lot more fun than grinding at it alone. That’s part of the reason we wanted to make Bad Kids because it was fun.” 

It was also important to be able to struggle together because doing this alone didn’t hold the same weight. 

“I think I’m capable of it,” he said of continuing in music. But would it be worth it without his friends? 

These days, Ing is looking towards a future without using music to make money. He still has a few fan favorites he wants to drop and he’s not completely given up on dabbling in music for fun. But that’s the point - if Ing were to ever continue, it would have to purely be for the love of the art and for the community. 

But even if that doesn’t happen, Ing has more than enough to keep him busy. “I had ambitions before music, to go into med,” he told me, “and I have ambitions after music to go into finance.” These days, Ing is working towards a master’s degree and spends his days locked in on school work and preparing for the future. 

Instead of music being an integral part of Ing, it is not just one part of him. And that feels healthier. 

When I asked what he values the most about his time in music, Ing was quiet for a moment. The answer, he said finally, “is the community that my supporters [called cyngles] were able to build around my music. It was a huge honor even to just see a couple of people praise my art like that.” 

Ing thought more about his fanbase and his friendships in music. He might have never scaled millions of listeners but he does know he made an impact. He can feel, at the very least, that his work matters; that it touches people – and maybe, that’s enough to turn the page. 

“When I first started out, there was none of that support for me. I had a community that was really, really dedicated and it was really touching. Audience is a core part of who I am and who I was as an artist.” He smiled for a moment. “If there’s anything that draws me back to full grinding as an artist, it might be that.”