How Laufey is Revolutionizing Jazz: The André Rieu Effect

Laufey is doing for Jazz what André Rieu did for Classical Music: making Jazz popular to an audience not used to the genre. Here’s how.

Born in 1993, Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir - known simply as Laufey - is an Icelandic-Chinese singer and songwriter that is taking Jazz by storm.

As we will see, Laufey's popularity is not only due to her magnificent voice... but first let me just share some facts that show why her (commercial) success is especially remarkable in the Jazz genre.

Why so few people listen to Jazz these days?

Commercially, Jazz is not popular. In fact, it often competes with Classical music for the BOTTOM tier of music popularity. Take a look at the following chart, which shows that, in 2014, Jazz made up a meager 1.4% of U.S. music consumption according to Nielsen (and, since then the situation has not improved dramatically):

The decline in consumption of Jazz music led legendary Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis to reach out to Harvard Business School's Rohit Deshpandé in an attempt to breathe new life into the genre. For instance, Deshpandé wrote a case study ("Wynton Marsalis & Jazz at Lincoln Center") to explore how to 'sell jazz' in executive education classes.

In short, Jazz suffers from at least three critical 'marketing' challenges:

• An aging audience: Jazz centers often rely on season ticket models that favor older audiences and fail to attract younger listeners who don't like models with "strings attached" and upfront payments.
• Too complex for today's 'ears': Jazz is too harmonically complex. In a world where capturing attention amidst many distractions (and increasingly 'easy-to-listen' Pop) it is increasingly difficult to sell such complex music.
• Elitism: Jazz is also perceived - especially by younger audiences - as elitist and disconnected from current trends, in part due to its own resistance to adapt.

Laufey: Reinventing Jazz(?)

Consciously or not, Laufey has precisely been fighting these three challenges with enormous success... Some even argue that Laufey is 'reinventing' Jazz (a claim fiercely debated, of course...).

In a way, Laufey is doing to Jazz what "André Rieu" did to Classical music: making it more accessible, simpler, and attractive to a wider audience.

She is not the first trying it.. Yet, somehow, she has been able to strike a balance between simplification and quality (i.e., avoiding falling in the dreaded category of 'elevator jazz' or 'mall jazz' :)).

But... how did she manage to reach here?

Step 1: She innovated the target audience for Jazz (or, how to make Gen Z'ers scream at a Jazz standards...)

Laufey's first step was to deliberately target a much younger audience that would otherwise hardly be exposed to Jazz.

Traditionally, Jazz is not very welcoming of younger audiences. In a recent YouTube video by Adam Neely ("Is Laufey Jazz"), around minute 9:52, Jazz star Wynton Marsalis is seen stating in an old TV interview:

When I am giving clinics, kids typically ask me 'what about relating to us?', and I have to tell them 'look... adults don't appeal to children'...

In contrast with this, Laufey targets the Gen Z. If you search on YouTube you will see plenty of videos where we can see Laufey's audience treating her nearly as a pop artist. As Laufey herself puts it in a recent interview to the Zach Sang Show:

All of a sudden there were thousand of teenagers screaming along to a jazz standard...

Step 2: She dared to demystify Jazz

Her next step was to cater to her chosen audience by making Jazz more accessible. In her own words, less "snobby" (which is making Jazz purists mad :)).

One of Laufey's most impressive hits is "From the Start" from her 2023 album Bewitched, a Bossa Nova theme that is reminiscent of singers like Astrud Gilberto, but is 're-packaged' in a novel flashy style that is more accessible and modern, potentially appealing to a younger and more pop-influenced audience:

Laufey seems to be 'averse' to Jazz's elitism. For instance, in a 2023 interview to the Zach Sang Show, she confessed the following:

The first time I went to a Jazz club was... [laughs]... the first time that I played in a Jazz club a couple of months ago...

Step 3: Connect and communicate where your audience is (i.e., promoting Jazz on TikTok)

During COVID-19 Laufey also nurtured a strong presence on social media, especially TikTok. In September 2023, a YouTuber name Viggy made a video about Laufey and her meteoric rise on TikTok.

When trying to capture her TikTok metrics, he basically couldn't keep up with the numbers. In one month Laufey's number of views on TikTok grew from 480 million to 521 million (he wrote a correction on top of his voice stating "growing so fast, I can't keep up").

Viggy credits Laufey's TikTok strategy as a critical pillar of her success:

She did it (i.e., become a Jazz star) by becoming a TikTok meme (...) not in a bad way, but by acting goofy and relatable on TikTok

TikTok helped her connect with fans. Laufey also constantly responds and interacts with her fans, showing them she is "just like them" and not an intellectual artist on a pedestal...

Result: 12M Fans on Spotify!!

Jazz aficionados may not be fans of her style of communication... but hey... she is also not targeting them... For her audience this approach is working extremely well...

As of October 2023, Laufey has amassed nearly 12M monthly listeners on Spotify, making her one of the world's most listened Jazz musicians at the moment (see chart below, with the number of listeners on 23/10/2023).

She is also touring across the world. I already have tickets to see her in March 2024 at Melkweg in Amsterdam :).

#TikTokJazz #JazzMusic #InnovationInMusic #MusicMarketing #MarketingStrategy #SocialMediaMarketing #TikTokMarketing

Sources

• Camerota, Christian (2017), "Does Jazz Music Need Star Power?," Harvard Business School Newsroom [Link]
• Neely, Adam (2023), "Is Laufey Jazz" [YouTube Video Link]
• Viggy (2023), "How Laufey Revived the Worst-Selling Music Genre" [YouTube Video Link]