St.

Viceunt College of Cabuyao

The Globalization of Popular Music: A Multilevel Analysis of Music Flows

Mark Aldrin S. Gonzales

Mrs. Carol Palamara

“One of the good things about globalization is it has created a single

international music community, and I feel very much part of it.”

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decades, we have witnessed a clear increase in the exchange of cultural

products across the globe, as evident in media trade studies of film (e.g. Fu, 2006; Fu &

Sim, 2010) and music (Moon Barnett, & Lim, 2010), cross-national comparisons of the

newspaper coverage of culture (Janssen, Kuipers & Verboord, 2008), and comparative

analyses of popularity rankings of media products (e.g. Achterberg, Heilbron,Houtman,

& Aupers, 2011; Fu, 2012). Yet, empirical investigations of these trends mostly focus on

the macro level (by analyzing aggregated data), thereby underestimating the

multilayered structure and complexity of cultural globalization (Appadurai, 1996;

Straubhaar, 2014), and neglecting the role of individual agents.

Taking the case of pop music, we advance on previous studies of global media flow in

at least three ways. First, our focus on products – in our case, music hits - and their

related artists, rather than on country aggregates of successful products, allows a more

precise analysis of flows.

Second, we conduct a multilevel analysis that estimates the relative importance of

factors shaping international music flow at the global, country, and individual level.
Third, we compare explanatory variables from various theoretical perspectives, while

adding the understudied factors of music television and individual “star power”.

Our aim is twofold. First, we set out to describe the trends in global music flow in the

period 1960-2010 that can be observed in nine Western countries differing in size,

language, and relevance in the field of music production (US, UK, France, Germany,

Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Australia). More specifically, this article analyses

the international composition of pop charts - one of the most dominant "market

information regimes" (Anand & Peterson, 2000) through which producers and

consumers assess what is popular in the music market. Notwithstanding the various

ways in which charts have been compiled over time (via sales, air play, downloads) and

methodologies (e.g. store surveys, product scans), they have become institutions

featured in most mediatized societies, from the magazine to the iTunes era (Anderton,

Dubber, & James, 2012; Burnett, 1996).

Our second aim is to explain these trends, combining several explanatory models of

how cultural media products spread across the world. The model of cultural proximity

(or distance) perceives global media flow to be in close alignments to geo-cultural and

cultural-linguistic identities (cf. Straubhaar, 2014). Economic models of media trade

markets place more emphasis on the importance of market size, yet also adopted

cultural distance and language as predictors of media flow (e.g. Fu, 2013; Fu & Sim,

2010). The model of cultural centrality, on other hand, accentuates symbolic production

and views transnational cultural exchange in the light of competition for dominant

aesthetic position-takings and status in the global field (Janssen et al., 2008). Finally,
more politically oriented scholarship has pointed to the role of media systems (e.g.

Norris & Inglehart, 2009) and to wider political sentiments that may impact a society’s

openness towards foreign culture (Achterberg et al., 2011; Bekhuis, 2013).

Our contribution lies in combining these macro-level factors in one explanatory model to

estimate their relative importance. We also add two factors that have been associated

with globalization in cultural economics and celebrity studies, yet which have so far

largely been ignored in the study of media flow. First, we specify how television

contributes to spreading music across the globe by investigating the impact of the

availability of music television channels in a country. Second, we analyze – at the micro

level – the impact of individual (Turner, 2013), and the effect of participation of artists

“superstars” (Adler, 2003), that is celebrities whose brand-name recognition benefits

sales in television talent shows (Redmond, 2014).

Methodologically, we contribute to the explanation of cultural globalization by applying

a multilevel design that enables us to analyze simultaneously the impact of attributes of

multiple origin countries and destination countries, country ties, and individuals.

Moreover, our research design explicitly takes into account that many cultural products

do not attain global success. We do so by modeling artist-country dyads that indicate

whether an artist had success abroad or not (estimated separately for every destination

country in the design).

We first conceptualize cultural globalization, build our explanatory model based on

previous research, and develop hypotheses. We then provide a detailed methodology

and outline our findings and conclusions.

Over the past decades, scholars of cultural globalization have focused on defining the

phenomenon and explaining its causes and effects (e.g. Nederveen Pieterse, 2004;

Tomlinson, 1999). In general terms, cultural globalization can be conceptualized

according to two dimensions: firstly, the spatial transnational diffusion and availability in

any given location of cultural goods and media products, such as films, television

programs, books, and music singles, generated from elsewhere in the world (Crane,

2002); secondly, the process of reflexivity and articulation of disparate cultures within

individuals and cultural and media products, whereby multi-layered identities emerge

(Nederveen Pieterse, 2004; Straubhaar, 2014). Our research centers primarily on the

former conceptualization, and a number of models have been developed

to explain such diffusion.

While earlier theorizations propounding a model cultural imperialist model, -- in which

monopolistic core countries prevail over peripheral and semi-peripheral ones

(Wallerstein, 1979) impact of structural and economic conditions on cultural trade. The

buying power of markets often measured by market size, population size, or prosperity

-- has been identified as a predictor of international cultural trade dynamism (e.g. Fu,

2013; Fu & Sims, 2010; Hoskins, McFadyen, & Finn, 1997). More specifically, a large

domestic market, often accompanied by a wider and more vibrant local cultural

production, accrues a “home market advantage” (Waterman, 2005): for instance the

larger a country’s size the more its media consumption concerns domestic content
(Oh, 2001; Puppis, 2009). Because of this advantage, producers can invest more and

achieve higher quality products, in turn strengthening their position in the international

market (Fu & Sim, 2010; Hoskins et al., 1997; Marvasti, 1994). In short, according to

this perspective, producers from a large domestic market, with large economic power,

are better able to export their products abroad.

Such economic explanations have been extended with symbolic dimensions by the

theory of cultural centrality. Starting from the concept of a global “cultural field”

(Bourdieu, 1993) in which certain countries have higher concentration of symbolic

capital and prestige than others (Casanova, 2004; De Swaan, 1999), this theory

contends that countries possess a differential ability to entice the imagination and

interest of other countries through their cultural production (Appadurai, 1996;

Heilbron, 1999). Cultural centrality thus concerns the extent to which a

country’s cultural production interests foreign producers, experts and audiences. The

more countries succeed in attaining a central position in cultural production,

exemplified by the international circulation or consecration of their products, the more

they themselves engage in domestic cultural consumption, and vice versa (Heilbron,

1999; Janssen et al., 2008). In a similar vein, studies on media production have noted

the distinction between centers and peripheries, and how this informs the way

producers search for international audiences .

This research offers more insight in the multi-layered structure of cultural globalization

and as such contributes to ongoing research into global media flow. It maps trends in

the diffusion of pop music products in the past 50 years, and presents a multilevel

analysis that estimates the relative importance of factors at the global, country, and

individual level, which include the not previously examined determinants music

television and “star power”. The trend analysis shows that pop music charts have

clearly become more globally oriented since the 1960s. Overall, our results point to

processes of cultural convergence as indicated by the fact that the Western charts

studied here increasingly contain Anglo-American pop music. While Italy and France

have opened up more and more to foreign products, the United States remain highly

focused on domestic content. Yet our data show that the level of internationalization of

music charts is by no means a relentless and homogeneous process, but

indeed one with considerable fluctuations. Partly this seems to reflect fads in

musical genres, but also media developments (e.g. MTV stimulating

internationalization in the 1980s) appear to have bolstered multi-directional flows of

music.

Our explanatory analyses both confirm the importance of geo-cultural ties

between countries (as observed in the negative effects of cultural and geographical

distance), and suggest the existence of cultural-linguistic markets for popular music --

in line with earlier studies on film and television (e.g. Fu & Sim, 2010; Straubhaar,

2014). We make advancement by showing that the centrality of cultural production is a

“central” countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom have

higher chances of achieving global success than those from more peripheral countries.

This resultspecifies previous findings on the impact of market size and a country’s

prosperity on cultural flows (Fu & Sim, 2010) in the sense that it highlights the

importance of being associated with successful production contexts (regardless

population size or GDP). As such, our study provides an important link to studies

emphasizing the power of geographical centers of cultural production (Scott, 2000).

While this is partly economic power, we believe that symbolic dimensions, as

underlined in studies of global inequalities in the cultural field (Casanova, 2004; Janssen

et al., 2008), should not be left unattended. Interestingly, we find that central countries

are not more difficult to access, which suggests that industry strength may operate

more as “calling card” to enter new markets than as protection against competitors

from outside. Importantly, cultural centrality operates irrespective of nationality of

performers, since many performers move to geographical centers in order to

increase chances of global success (e.g. Rihanna who has Barbadian nationality

yet relocated to New York early in her career).

This brings us to a second contribution our analysis makes: the importance of individual

star power for global success. Star power is, in fact, the strongest predictor of foreign

chart success in our data. Our study thus provides substance to claims made by cultural

economists (Adler, 2006) and celebrity scholars (Turner, 2013) on how fame and

stardom increase global commercial success. Irrespective of origin or destination

US or UK, chances of further success increase considerably.

This result points at the importance of distinctive brannsd-name recognition for

achieving success, but, of course, does not rule out the production work of the industry

that molds such identities (Redmond, 2014). How record companies consider the

“global” in their star building activities needs more research – in line with Turner’s

(2010) plea for more attention to “understanding the industrial production, as well as

the audience consumption, of celebrity” (We find limited support for political

explanations of cultural globalization, as well as for the role of commercial television.

Thus, it is questionable whether the revival of domestic music 2011; Bekhuis, 2013).

since the 1990s can be attributed to a country’s political climate as some argue

(Achterberg et al., Instead, we observe that local music television and – at the

individual level – participation in TV talent shows has a negative effect on achieving

foreign success.

The strong impact of cultural centrality implies that future research should further

examine the role of the industry, particularly insofar as it affects diversity of acts and

the position of music from more peripheral countries (e.g. Dowd, 2013). This concerns

both in-depth explorations of how industry practices work within local and global

configurations (Marshall, 2013; Wilkins et al., 2014) and a further examination of

conglomerization processes, with special attention for the role of star power

(Hesmondhalgh, 2012). On the one hand, media companies have become

of music superstars on a global level. On the other hand, the international music market

is still structured around a variety of local markets, and the advent of digital

technology seems only to have strengthened this connection to the local (Marshall,

2013; Wikström, 2009, p. 69ff).

Some limitations to our study need to be mentioned. First, we acknowledge that

our approach to analyzing global pop chart success does not leave much room for

considering cultural hybridization processes in which globalization is viewed more on a

continuum where cultures are being mixed and adapted to various degrees (e.g.

Appadurai, 1996; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004).

Second, due to limited availability of historical charts, our analyses are confined to

countries in the Western part of the world. Future analyses should expand on the non-

Western and non-English speaking countries which share a language, to further

examine cultural exchange in geographical regions (e.g. Straubhaar, 2007) as well as

the cultural-linguistic component in global media flow (as has been done for movies, for

instance, in Fu, 2006). Finally, we note that our analysis only concern single chart.