Tracks taking Flight
If you’ve opened TikTok lately, you’ve likely heard it: “Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday.” That cheeky sing-song phrase, lifted from a 2024 commercial by British low-cost airline Jet2holidays, has unexpectedly become one of the platform’s most recognizable sounds. Originally composed as a harmless travel jingle, it has since been repurposed by users to soundtrack everything from flight delays to sunburn horror stories. The result: over 1.5 million videos and counting.
Something else happened—two Soca tracks spiked across streaming platforms, driven not by Carnival, but by the power of algorithmic alignment and cross-cultural surprise. The results were swift and measurable.
“Jumbo Jet,” a power soca track by Bunji Garlin, anchored by Arnold “Blackstarr” Noel’s Jumbie Jab riddim, released nearly a decade ago in September 2017. In the pre-streaming era, Bunji Garlin’s “Jumbo Jet” was a monster on the road, fueled by booming trucks, speaker-stacked corners, and the raw kinetic energy of Carnival, The track is now in the midst of a significant return to global rotation. Dating back to June 1, 2025, the song had generated 646,000 Spotify streams. Then came the spike. Over the past 60 days, the track added nearly 200,000 additional Spotify streams (+30%), with daily stream counts rising from just over 200 pre-Jet2 to more than 3,000 during the past 60 days. The spike wasn’t confined to Spotify. In Canada, the track re-entered the iTunes (Reggae) chart for the first time since 2024, appearing three times between mid-July and the end of the month, peaking at #20 on July 23.
Problem Child’s “Holiday,” released in May 2023 on the Black Keys riddim and produced by Jus-Jay King and Neilux, has followed a different trajectory. Already a streaming force before Jet2 memes hit the timeline, the song averages over 5,000 Spotify plays per day. In the wake of the trend, that number has crept even higher, adding roughly 200 additional plays daily. On July 5, “Holiday” reached its highest chart position of the year on Apple Music’s (World) chart in the United States, peaking at #87. In the United Kingdom, on iTunes (World) the track has found renewed spirits, landing on the chart 6 times in the Top 50 in the past 2 months. While the lift may appear subtle, in context, it still signals something important: even high-performing tracks can benefit from lateral cultural moments.
The parallel rise of these two songs, one older, one more recent, offers a valuable insight for Soca’s digital future. What’s most striking isn’t just the numbers. It’s the mechanism. Neither song was pushed through conventional promotion and the anticipation of a festival. There were no influencer campaigns and no dance challenges. What propelled these tracks was accidental virality. The Jet2 commercial went global, and these two Soca tracks, by lyrical proximity, got pulled into orbit.
TikTok didn’t know it was building a runway for Soca. Jet2 certainly didn’t intend to revive Soca anthems. But the convergence worked. It made clear what’s always been true: Soca doesn’t need to change to be successful in new spaces. It just needs new entry points.
In a genre often viewed through a single lens: Carnival, fete, repeat. This moment reveals something far more interesting. Soca, when given the room, is elastic. These aren’t just Carnival songs. They’re songs about motion, about escape, about freedom. These tracks both have lyrics that support a level of universality and timelessness, with an ability to come alive, even out of season, with new audiences.
Jump on the jumbo jet and take that holiday!
