Given the the digital revolution, the vigor with which America exports its pop culture, and the overwhelming global success of MTV in particular (thanks in large part to this guy), it’s a no-brainer to think that pop music has become pretty homogeneous around the world.
But it hasn’t.
That’s the argument of a new working paper by Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel, called “Pop Internationalism: Has a Half Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?” (abstract here; pdf here). There is a lot of great detail and data in the paper, but the gist is conveyed in the summary:
Advances in communication technologies over the past half century have made the cultural goods of one country more readily available to consumers in another, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies – in particular the U.S. – will displace the indigenous cultural products of smaller economies. In this paper we provide stylized facts about the global music consumption and trade since 1960, using a unique data on popular music charts from 22 countries, corresponding to over 98% of the global music market. We find that trade volumes are higher between countries that are geographically closer and between those that share a language. Contrary to growing fears about large- country dominance, trade shares are roughly proportional to country GDP shares; and relative to GDP, the U.S. music share is substantially below the shares of other smaller countries. We find a substantial bias toward domestic music which has, perhaps surprisingly, increased sharply in the past decade. We find no evidence that new communications channels – such as the growth of country-specific MTV channels and Internet penetration – reduce the consumption of domestic music. National policies aimed at preventing the death of local culture, such as radio airplay quotas, may explain part of the increasing consumption of local music.
This made me think back to when we were told that nationwide U.S. newscasts, with TV anchormen speaking in their flat midwestern tones, would wipe out regional accents. That didn’t happen. Nor, somehow, did Esperanto manage to conquer the globe.
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Nice one. I wonder, though, if the “domestice music” being produced is heavily influenced by American music? Japan, for example, now has lots of pop and rock music of its own. Some of it is quite original, but it still sounds more like American pop than traditional Japanese folk.
Interesting article anyway, as usual.
Regional accents haven’t been wiped out? My girlfriend is from Missouri and says about 5 words differently that I and my friends who grew up in New Jersey. Before television I promise it would have be a much bigger difference.
I was going to make the exact same observation as number 1 above. Country (rural) music in 2010 sounds vastly more like pop (urban) music than country music from 1950. You could say the same thing for music from just about any country. It’s “local” but really it’s just a locally produced derivative of the US/western source. This is true of clothing, art, dance, cars, food, just about anything consumable. And travelling across the US, in urban areas, I think most dialects are becoming more and more similar. I moved from St. Louis to Chicago a couple years ago, and among young people I encounter very few that speak with a “Chicago” accent.
Well, there’s the music people actually make, and then there’s the music people think other people will buy. That festival of camp known as the Eurovision Song Contest is a marvellous demonstration of the latter – winning songs, voted for by the public, tend to sound frighteningly like their own caricatures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd_-Bjt30PU
but nobody in Europe actually buys or performs music like this.
One suspects that you will hear homogeneous pop music if you listen to radio stations with large audience bases, but local music if you go to clubs. The economics arguments for such a difference are obvious even to me!
American pop music doesn’t sound any closer to American folk music than Japanese pop does to Japanese folk music. And a significant chunk of mainstream “American” pop music is written by Scandinavians (Max Martin, Stargate, etc). Pop has always been hybrid and polycultural, and American pop both influences, and is influenced by other cultures. It’s a kind of reverse arrogance to lament the fact that “US/Western” cultural products are displacing “local” or “rural” culture, without acknowledging how deeply those other cultural products influence American culture. And the belief that the music of other cultures can only be considered distinct if it adheres to some purist “folk” aesthetic is just odd. What about Juanes, Shakira, Rachid Taha, M.I.A., RedOne, Rihanna, etc? What about dubstep, reggaeton, highlife, mbalax? Musicians from every country are omnivores; they use bits of whatever appeals to them, and make it their own.
American Pop Music like texting, is a symptom of the numbness or even, “death”, of authentic humanity and communication. Instead of connecting we use music lyrics to do our communicating for us. Like in texting we “put out” the lyric/message as a kind of mask. We shield our vulnerability as if we are “communicating” in accepted, pre-digested sound bites. Then we get so used to the habit of this PRACTICE communication, that we lose the ability to even communicate to ourself! We have lost our own authentic unique voice because we have submitted our identity to the limitations of the range of proscribed social and cultural constructs. We can only regain or for the first time allow our unique authentic voice to emerge only by risking being emotionally vulnerable. Because of ego we fear others opinions, but the “others” we want approval from have yet to HAVE even a self TO give approval TO. We need to communicate/connect to our selves by risking to HAVE a self that is unlimited by social and cultural constructs of identity, even if it means social isolation because it is better to be an isolated human than a social ZOMBIE.
Communication Scholar George Rodman discusses the idea that many countries have placed “limits” on the amount of TV shows that can be “imported” into their countries. He provides Canada and France as examples.
He further discusses a Pew study which cites that many countries including Britain, Canada, Pakistan and Argentina have a majority of citizens who do not appreciate the overwhelming “customs” and “ideas” that are presented through by US media.
Although I cite television, customs and ideas above, I believe music can be included as well. Informally, from watching a few Bollywood movies and listening to cultural pop music from other societies it can be observed that many elements of ‘American’ music has been infused in other cultures’ music.
Just as we see elements of different countries’ music integrated into U.S. music.
Posted by Bakari Akil II, Ph.D., author of “Pop Psychology: The psychology of pop culture and everyday life!” (on Amazon)
facts, stylized.
The proximity of those words transgresses discourse conventions.