Your Next Favorite Artist Will Be Your Neighbor

Does music streaming enable or inhibit the success of local music? I explore this question with Will Page, the former Chief Economist of Spotify.

Years ago, American folklorist and historian William Ivey made a scary statement about how recorded music was flattening regional musical styles:

We once had a fairly vigorous assortment of regional musical styles in this country in both popular and folk traditions, but the impact of recordings - setting national standards of what, and how, music should be performed - has pushed us toward a homogenization of these distinctive traditions ... Recordings have, quite simply, changed the way we hear music. Performances are now joyously diffused through space and preserved through time, but our audience has come to focus extensively upon the recording itself rather than upon the music it contains ...

As music streaming has become ubiquitous, the potential issues that Ivey highlighted seem to be even more pressing. Nearly every piece of recorded music is instantly accessible. Regional music is a thing of the past. Global music is now and forever. Or is it?

Will Page - the former Chief Economist of Spotify and the author of the book Tarzan Economics (retitled Pivot) - and I decided to see if this was true. What we found is that as music streaming has gone global that music itself has gone local.

Glocalisation in the Music Industry

To investigate if streaming was making music more homogenous globally, we decided to look at the year-end top 10 songs in 2012, 2017, and 2022 in 10 European countries. We chose those years because in 2012 music downloads reigned supreme. In 2017, streaming was beginning to grow. And in 2022, streaming was the most popular way to listen to music. What we found was that as streaming has become more dominant domestic artists have become more prevalent in their country’s yearly top 10.

Let’s breakdown what’s going on here by looking at Italy. In 2012 and 2017, 3 of the top 10 songs on the year-end Italian chart (i.e., the most popular artists that Italian people were listening to) were by Italian artists. In 2022, 7 out of 10 were. This is a pattern we see in many European countries. As streaming has gone global, charts have gone local. Even in places where this effect doesn’t seem prevalent, like Spain, prove to have gone more local when we look closer.

Though only 30% of artists in Spain’s 2022 top 10 were Spanish, 100% of songs had lyrics completely in Spanish. We see a similar thing in Portugal. Though only 10% of artists in Portugal’s 2022 top 10 were Portuguese, 50% of songs had lyrics completely in Portuguese. In fact, as we dug into the data, every country in our sample except Ireland has seen local artists and languages become more prevalent as streaming has done the same.

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We borrowed the sociological term “glocalisation”, popularized by the late Roland Robertson, to describe this phenomenon. As described in our paper, glocalisation - a hybrid of globalization and localization - is “micro-marketing: the tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a global or near-global basis to increasingly differentiated local and particular markets.”

More specifically, glocalisation is McDonald’s offering low prices globally while adding the vegetarian McSpicy Paneer to their menu in India. It is Netflix promoting a different slate of shows in Germany and Spain despite the service being the same. It is IKEA selling furniture in Japan that wouldn’t be popular in the United States while still building their brand around quality.

McDonald’s menu India

We think streaming has enabled musical glocalisation because of how the economics of the industry have changed. In the age of CDs, cassettes, and vinyl, there were fixed costs associated with producing and distributing music. You had to make the CD, for example, and then ship it around the globe. In this scenario, it’s cheaper to promote a few artists worldwide. Developing niche, domestic hits is costly.

Streaming drove production and distribution costs close to zero. It now makes more economic sense to develop and scale local artists. Furthermore, in the streaming age consumers have disregarded older broadcast models, like radio and television, where choice is limited, and embraced on-demand content where they can choose what they want when they want. Consumers have proven that they want local flavor in their music. In short, streaming drives glocalisation on both the supply and demand side.

Of course, there are more considerations here. We explore them at length in our paper for the London School of Economics, where Will Page is a Visiting Fellow. You can read the entire thing by clicking the button below.

A New One
"Freestyle LVL UP 3" by Ninho
2023 - Trap

Ninho came up multiple times throughout our analysis. Raised in Nemours, he is one of the most popular French rappers around. The fact that Ninho performs in a style largely developed in the United States raises an important question about glocalisation. Is it possible that while artists are becoming more local that the music they make is becoming more globally homogenous?

An Old One
"Abbronzatissima" by Edoardo Vianello
1963 - Vocal Pop

Though we argue that streaming has made local acts more prevalent, there have always been popular local acts. “Abbronzatissima” was a massive hit for Italian artist Edoardo Vianello in Italy in the early 1960s. Though there are many qualities that I love about this song, the thing that keeps me coming back is the rhythm. It is both light, driving, and somewhat intoxicating.

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