Musicking TikTok

The first multi-year ethnographic work on musical practices in TikTok.

In the 21st century, musicking doesn’t just happen on platforms like Spotify. Musicking TikTok makes the important intervention of considering alternate platforms--namely, the TikTok--as contemporary loci for musical performance. Bermúdez provides frameworks for digital musical ethnography, the analysis of audiovisuality, and theorizing digital personacraft that will prove useful to scholars of TikTok and beyond.

From language and fashion to music and humor, TikTok has revolutionized the way we live our lives. This is no secret to the TikTokers who eagerly approach the platform to forge a sense of identity and belonging. In Musicking TikTok , Bermúdez masterfully unpacks this phenomenon through detailed analyses of how these TikTokers cultivate and perform identity, ultimately creating musical practices that have reverberating effects far beyond social media.

In Musicking TikTok: A Musical Ethnography from a Glocal Austrian Context Juan Bermúdez presents a multi-perspectival ethnography of popular TikTok music focusing on musical practices in digital spaces and on digital stages. The author explores in a very elaborated way the strategies and (virtual) performances of TikTokers becoming experts in developing a TikTok persona. This analysis provides new material for a much better transdisciplinary understanding of the integrity of digital and analogue performances and representations and of its crucial meanings for constructions of musicking and identity today. Therefore, this journey into the glocal worlds of TikTok is a deeply compelling read for interested fans, journalists, teachers, and especially researchers.

This book demonstrates that ethnomusicology has much to offer the study of digital platforms. With thorough and thoughtful engagement, Bermu´dez shows how core ideas in the discipline can offer a useful roadmap for new questions. The book models a method for examining digital music worlds, in ways that invite future scholarship and prompt classroom conversations.

Juan Bermúdez is a senior scientist at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria and an APART-GSK Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His current work focuses on music and dance practices in multimedia contexts.