Local, an aesthetic: the deglobalisation of fun
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Why are Danish listeners choosing home‑grown music over global hits?
The Economist. Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.
And I'm Rosie Blore.
Today on the show, our America at age two fifty series tackles the nineteen eighties and nineties, and why mosquitoes might not be repelled by repellent.
First up though.
Denmark's Roskilda Festival is kicking off this June and the musical lineup there is as international as ever.
Tom Wainwright is our media editor.
It features The Cure from Britain, Addison Ray from America, Jenny from Blackpink which is from South Korea, and loads of other worldwide acts from Australia's folk bitch trio to the pilly pilly girls of Tanzania. But if you eavesdrop on the private playlists of Danish festival goes, you might hear a more local soundtrack. The country's most streamed song of last year, Healer Wein, or All the Way, was by Omar and Umla, a pair of Danish artists. And in fact nine of the top ten tracks in Denmark in twenty twenty five were by Danes belting out lyrics in Danish. It might seem surprising that in a world of global stars, a country of just six million people, many of them fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music, and until fairly recently they didn't.
In twenty nineteen, when artists like Ed Sheeran and Lady Gargar were riding high in the charts, only four songs in Denmark's top twenty were in Danish. By last year that figure was eighteen. A similar trend is underway in other countries and in other entertainment formats. Worldwide platforms are driving a surprising surge in homegrown entertainment.
Tom, we know the economist loves a Nordic model, but what's really the global trend that's going on here?
Well, it's not just in the Nordics. This is happening all over the place. From Asia to the Americas, we see music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. And it's not just happening in music either. We're seeing something interestingly similar happening in television, where people's viewing habits are moving away from Hollywood. And in video gaming, where increasingly gaming trends in different regions of the world seem to be quite distinct from each other. And for people who thought that globalization would lead to a stale worldwide monoculture, this local revival is a bit of a surprise. What we're seeing is that local culture is proving very resilient, and as that happens, America's grip on worldwide popular culture is loosening.
How are streaming platforms fueling a surge in local music worldwide?
So we've got quite a cultural array to cover here. Let's just talk about music first of all. How is the industry changing?
Well it's changing in two quite different ways. Streaming services like Spotify seem on the one hand to be making the biggest stars bigger. So people like Taylor Swift have got a deeper global reach than they ever would have done in the pre streaming era. But at the same time it's making the long tail of smaller musicians longer. It's making it much easier for smaller acts to produce music and to distribute it. And so So what we see is that although these big acts are getting bigger, the fact that it's easier for smaller acts to get published and to get distributed means that there's been this explosion in local music which has seen charts from Europe to Latin America and Asia fill up with a greater share of locally produced songs.
Aren't the barriers to entry much higher in TV? What's going on there?
Well yes, they are, in the sense that it's seen more expensive to make a T V series than it is to make a song. But we're seeing something similar going on here as well. Hollywood's share of all global streaming commissions is falling. And we're seeing streamers like Netflix, for example, pushing hyperlocal series like for instance there's one called Sixteen Seventy, which is a sort of Monty Python-esque comedy set in seventeenth century Poland.
Jest rok 1670. Miałem szczęście urodzić się szlachcicem w Polsce, najpotężniejszym państwie na świecie.
And it's not just Netflix. Amazon has made some big bets in regions like Latin America, for example. What we're seeing is that as streamers push deeper into foreign markets, they're commissioning local shows to help them reach subscribers beyond the elites who might previously have been happy just with American series.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are Danish listeners choosing home‑grown music over global hits?
0:03–2:51
2
How are streaming platforms fueling a surge in local music worldwide?
2:51–5:03
3
What is driving the shift from Hollywood‑centric TV to hyper‑local series?
5:03–7:40
4
Why are Netflix and Amazon investing in region‑specific shows?
7:40–10:22
5
How does mobile gaming reflect distinct regional preferences?
10:22–13:04
6
Is America’s cultural soft‑power waning in music, TV and gaming?
13:04–16:27
7
What caused the 1980s AIDS crisis and how did politics respond?
16:27–19:41
8
Can mosquitoes learn to associate DEET with food, and what does that mean for repellents?
19:41–22:41