Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at TikTok’s international folk music community as an aquapelagic assemblage that reinforces locality while embracing globalization, using case studies of traditional musicians across the North Atlantic, and participant observation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at TikTok’s international folk music community as an aquapelagic assemblage that reinforces locality while embracing globalization, using case studies of traditional musicians across the North Atlantic, and participant observation. In late 2020, sea shanties became famously popular on the app TikTok. This phenomenon struck home with people across oceans, and served as a siren song, calling traditional musicians en masse. The app blends social media with simple media creation and production tools, giving both a creative venue and source of community to pandemic-frustrated musicians. Notable is the ‘duet’ feature, which enables co-performance and allows musicians to collaborate in a dynamic and uniquely accessible way.

This developed into a hybridized community of traditional music of the North Atlantic. On one hand, the style, repertoire, and language lean towards a blend of Celtic-centric anglophone traditions. Yet, unique regional and indigenous traditions are encouraged and can thrive at the same time; and both the localized and international movements play off of each other.

Ultimately, TikTok’s popularity and unique features do not modify localized musical identity itself, but rather how it is enacted. Musicians adapt, taking their tunes from stages to screens, banter from pubs to personal messages, and gatherings from community dances to comment sections. The result is a digitally embodied transatlantic phenomenon that challenges rigid conceptions of identity and locality.