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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“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.”
It didn’t, but there is some basis for the prediction. When the radio, and later with the economic miracle of the 1950′s the tv, became an item available to the vast majority, it played a large part in establishing a standard Italian language. Previously local dialects were predominant (at the time of unification, only some 2.5% understood and spoke what we know as Italian. Today that figure is reversed, and a percentage slightly larger than that don’t speak it today (predominantly elders).
More importantly: looking at evolution in ten-year fragments, the percentage of Italians using standardized Italian rather than their local dialect is rising dramatically.
Twenty years ago, 32% spoke their dialect as a first language, today that figure is 16%.
Sounds interesting, but I wonder if there’s a way to study this by music genre instead of country. Ex – Has rock displaced local/indigenous music? Can you chart the spread of it across time? I know there’s a lot of interplay between styles, but it could be interesting.
I spent a few months travelling through Asia, and found that certain American pop had made it around (Beyoncee, The Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga), while very little rock made it the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan. I heard Korean Pop in the Philippines, but never again in America.
If you need evidence, I give you the band Dengue Fever from Long Beach, California, which, in case you don’t know, contains the largest Cambodian community outside Phnom Penh. It sounds like American pop until you realize they’re singing in Khmer.
What’s local or regional anymore anyway?
Personally, I consume a decent amount of music from around the world (though 99% of it in English). This is because I have better/easier access to it than ever before.
However, I listen to more music from the Mid-West than anywhere else. Part of that reason is because I can see these bands in shows, which makes me a bigger fan and introduces me to more local music (opening bands, local artists collaborating on new projects, etc).
The rest of the music is centralized around large cities (LA, NYC, Portland, etc), which isn’t too surprising. Of that music, I can usually tell the general area it comes from. I can hear a difference between California bands, Mid-West bands, New York bands, or British bands.
It seems to me that there’s a local influence, at least for the artists. They tour together, they play together, they go to the same shows together, and those common experiences give a common sound to their music.
Interesting take on regional accents. I think there are lots of pockets of disagreement. The accent of younger Australian has definitely changed and become slightly Americanised in many cases.
Same thing for pop music. Even if different countries purchase different music, the song structures and sounds are often quite similar, as Shane points out above. Much like the Europeans influenced American music so heavily in the 60s and 70s.
The last decade has seen *tremendous* reductions in the cost of producing and distributing music. I wouldn’t expect anything other than an increase in domestic and niche music.
And now we’re being told that the death of newspapers somehow means the death of local news (or the death of all investigative journalism, depending on who you ask). I’m sure we’ll laugh at that in a few decades too.
This article made me think about Tom Petty’s 2002 interview in Rolling Stone Magazine. I never forgot that interview and I have posted in my cubicle so I can read it often.