The writer is author of ‘Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of Disruption’
Britain can proudly claim to be one of only four music-exporters in the world, alongside the US, Sweden and more recently South Korea. Yet while we used to churn out a global star most years, we haven’t produced a truly worldwide success since Dua Lipa in 2017. What’s changed? Glocalisation: a tongue-twisting hybrid of globalisation and localisation, the ramifications of which are going to be felt for years to come in the music industry and beyond.
Recall how the more familiar globalisation was supposed to work. Richer countries would exploit their first-mover advantage over poorer ones, making the world “flat”, or at least flatter, as global brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks bedded in across an increasingly homogenised society.
In the arts, belief in this logic led distinctive markets like France to fear the dominance of others and resort to heavy-handed “exception culturelle” quota policies to protect their cultural industries in local media.
So much for the theory. In practice, we’re now learning that the world isn’t flat after all. In a recent paper, Chris Dalla Riva and I uncovered clear and surprising evidence of local music thriving in each country on global streaming platforms — a dynamic that didn’t exist when neighbourhood record shops and radio stations controlled what grabbed our attention. British artists may have dominated the UK charts last year, but the Germans, French and Italians reigned in their home markets, to name only three countries.
What’s more, the local chart-toppers are increasingly performing in their native languages. The charts in Sweden, an early adopter of streaming, were dominated by Swedes performing in Swedish last year. A decade ago, neither Swedes nor their language were in the majority.
Polish acts now dominate the Polish charts, as well, albeit many are performing hip-hop, an American genre. Localisation of artists, but globalisation of genre.
Which brings us back to glocalisation, a term popularised by the sociologist Roland Robertson in 1995. With remarkable foresight, Robertson posited that the proliferation of “ethnic” supermarkets in California was not making the world flat, but rather transforming the global into the local.
“Diversity sells,” Robertson proclaimed. Perhaps he saw Koreans in Los Angeles’s Koreatown shunning McDonald’s because they wanted to eat their own unique food with its connection to their culture and home.
Robertson died a year ago, but the glocalisation of music gives his counterintuitive insight new life. On the supply side, borderless digital streaming has slashed the costs of production and distribution, making local music more profitable to invest in. On the demand side, consumers have shunned linear, “one-to-many” broadcast models like radio and television (in which you get what you’re given) in favour of interactive, on-demand streaming (where you choose what you want).
The music industry was the first to suffer and the first to recover from digital disruption; it sets the tone in media. But other attention seekers such as audiobooks, television and film are also feeling the effects of glocalisation. Netflix’s investment in the 22,000-square-metre Madrid Content City has made it the largest of its kind in Europe.
The consequences of all this go well beyond media. Steve Boom, who runs Amazon’s numerous media offerings, concludes that the glocalisation trend “seems consistent with the broader societal trend that as we become more global, we are also becoming more tribal”. The world is not flat, it seems, but fractured.
All of this poses thorny questions for policymakers. Music and video streaming have achieved a politically desirable outcome — domestic prominence — without government intervention. Ironically, these unregulated global markets have succeeded where the regulated ones of local radio and television failed. If governments started regulating these streaming platforms, would glocalisation go into reverse?
This brings us back to Britain, and its English-speaking counterparts across the Atlantic. The English language has served as a comparative advantage for the US and UK in creative industries for over a century. The rest of the world listened (and watched) our creative content performed in our mother tongue. Those days are over, and they’re not coming back. Glocalisation means the English-speaking world isn’t going to have it so easy any more.
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