TikTok organist Anna Lapwood urges other classical musicians to use social media to reach younger listeners

A woman who went viral on TikTok for playing her organ has urged other classical musicians to take advantage of the social media platform to reach a younger audience.

Anna Lapwood, Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, told BBC Music magazine that she believes children spend a “horrific” amount of time scrolling through social media - but that means it classical musicians must have a presence on them if they hope to attract the next generation, such a Gen Z, to play a classical instrument.

Lapwood went viral on TikTok in May 2022, and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, when a video of her playing her organ alongside electronic artist Bonobo and his band was posted on the site. She now has over 555,000 thousand followers and 17 million likes on her TikTok account, which she lovingly refers to as #OrganTok. She also has 229,000 followers on her Instagram account, 153,000 followers on her Facebook account and over 56,000 followers on her X account.

She told the magazine: “People in classical music are always asking how they can reach a wider audience. The bizarrely simple answer is social media. It genuinely works. I saw a statistic recently saying that young people are spending on average six hours a day on TikTok and other social media. That may seem horrific, but if it’s true we had better make sure they are seeing classical music there for at least some of the time. We need to make ourselves relevant.”

Lapwood’s comments come as Ofcom revealed that TikTok is now the most popular source of news for 12 to 15-year-olds. The research by the regulator also found that topics of interest for this age range include ‘sports or sports personalities’ (23%), ‘music news or singers’ (15%), ‘celebrities or famous people’ (11%), ‘serious things going on in the UK’ (8%) and news about ‘animals or the environment’ (9%). 

‘They hear me play film music on TikTok, then they come to a recital’

Lapwood isn’t the only classical musician who is turning to TikTok to widen her fanbase. Gen Z musician Spencer Rubin has also gained a large following on TikTok playing the oboe. The 19-year-old, who is a student at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, has 1.5 million TikTok followers on TikTok and is known among his fans for his witty videos and playing a Beyoncé riff.

Meanwhile, Nathan Chan, aged 29, a cellist in the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, has played pieces based on emojis as a way of attracting younger listeners to his work. His videos show him playing the cello based on emojis as part of a comedy take on classical music.

Lapwood said younger people told her they came to her shows after seeing her play via videos they had seen on social media. She said: “They hear me play film music on TikTok, then they come to a recital and hear me play something more serious, such as the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes, and they enjoy it because, actually, it sounds just like film music.”

The 28-year-old, who was the first woman to be awarded an organ scholarship in the 560 year history of Magdalen College, Oxford, has another clever way of enticing youngsters to take an interest in classical music too - recreating music from Disney films.

She said: “It’s something I used to do all the time as a kid: sit at the piano, basically working out how to play by ear film scores I’d just heard in the cinema. My thinking now is that playing something really familiar on the organ, like a Disney film score, is a great way to attract new audiences to the organ.”

Lapwood, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, studied piano, violin, viola and composition at the Junior Department of the Royal Academy of Music and was the principal harpist for the National Youth Orchestra. She gained a first-class degree from Magdalen College and has since established herself as an organist, conductor, choir director and television and radio presenter.