Abstract
This research aims to study what role YouTube – arguably the largest and most popular video sharing website in the world – plays in the globalization of pop music. As a transnational medium, the internet has the potential to diminish the impact of cultural centrality and cultural proximity in explaining cultural flows. We conducted an empirical analysis of YouTube’s music video charts. In particular, we focused on the transnational music flows between Europe and Asia, with special attention paid to the positions of Japan and South Korea. The former is the second largest music market in the world, while the latter is increasingly associated with successfully exporting its local pop music (K-pop) in the digital era. The results show that the internet has closed the gap between cultures from different parts of the world to only a limited extent. At the same time, we found that artists from South Korea had the strongest presence in the South-East Asian charts, with greater cultural centrality than the US and Japan. The implications of these findings are discussed below.
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Notes
- 1.
YouTube ranks second among all websites according to the authoritative web traffic analytics website Alexa.com (retrieved December 5, 2016).
- 2.
Of course, a considerable element of downloaded music is that this is done without consumers paying for them.
- 3.
The other major record company, Warner Music Group, has signed a deal with Hulu, another syndication hub incorporating NBC, FOX and Disney/ABC.
- 4.
To make sure these lists did not differ across users (e.g. because of search histories), we cross-checked them by accessing them through various different computers. The lists were always the same.
- 5.
Note that, for some countries, the share of the domestic repertoire was not available in the IFPI report. For Germany and France, we therefore used information from a report on music circulation in Europe. We found online references for certain origin countries in our sample (Canada ). Meanwhile, we estimated the share based upon the charts in 2010 for Lithuania, Russia and Romania.
- 6.
Note that most of these hits are American (79). We found one Canadian, six New Zealand (all by singer Lorde) and one Australian hit video.
- 7.
Accordingly, our categorization in all likelihood slightly underestimates the importance of the US, as many artists go there to record their records.
- 8.
Note that Burgess and Green (2009) have also already signalled that a substantial amount of the video material on YouTube comes from the dominant global media corporations.
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Kist, J., Verboord, M. (2018). The Diffusion of Music Via YouTube: Comparing Asian and European Music Video Charts. In: Kawashima, N., Lee, HK. (eds) Asian Cultural Flows. Creative Economy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0147-5_12
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