Your Favorite Martian (non-existent YouTube music channel album; 2012)

YFM's former YouTube channel icon.

Status: Non-existent

Yourfavoritemartian (or YFM) is a music-based YouTube channel created by Ray William Johnson in March of 2006. By 2012, the channel had amassed over 2.2 million subscribers. The channel was, at one point, the most subscribed music channel on YouTube.

On May 9th, 2012, Your Favorite Martian began doing cover songs, explaining that all original content was going towards the album they had just announced. However, on November 30th, 2012, the band announced that the "project had been retired." This was a direct result of a dispute between Maker Studios and Ray William Johnson, the co-creator of the band. Maker Studios, who had funded the production of YFM, and, specifically, the announced album, demanded a higher revenue share of Johnson's AdSense revenue and more control over the joint intellectual property of the two parties and, when Johnson declined, the network cut funding for the album. The group released a final mashup video of their previous songs on the channel. In the end, Johnson explained that they were going to go and work on the said album for a few months. Johnson can be quoted in the video as saying "that they had been working on the album for eight months," leading to speculation as to whether remnants of work from that time period still existed or if those efforts were ultimately destroyed by Johnson. The announcement of the album has since been removed from the Boom Headshot music video but videos of the music video with the announcement intact have been saved and reuploaded.

While eager fans have speculated that the album could see a release at a later time, no material had ever surfaced since the "project was retired," displaying slim chances of this happening.

Possible Information

Although Ray doesn’t completely neglect the project’s existence nowadays. It seems he doesn’t feel comfortable talking about the album, as in his "YFM Reunion" Vlog, he only mentions the project’s retirement. This, along with the fact that the studio that was animating the music videos at the time, Cosmic Toast Studios closed in 2016, so it seemed unlikely that we would ever get closure about the album.

Non-Existence

On May 17th, 2022, The Your Favorite Martian YouTube account addressed what happened to the planned album, admitting that the YFM project was cancelled well before plans started. Thus, confirming that this does not exist.^[1]