“Fly Me to the Moon”: Jazz on TikTok

Abstract

Jazz is very popular on TikTok. A search for the hashtag #jazz currently leads to a list of videos with a total of 2.7 billion views on the platform, and there are many young jazz musicians taking advantage of the opportunities the platform TikTok offers them to reach large audiences. With this article, I want to show how jazz is presented on the platform. The main questions are the following: Which jazz styles are particularly popular on TikTok and for what reasons? Which groups of musicians are especially visible on the platform? And what might the mechanisms of the TikTok platform, that is, the app’s functions and the algorithmic system, have to do with the popularization of certain jazz styles and (groups of) musicians? My research is based on a corpus analysis of one hundred highly popular jazz videos uploaded onto the platform.