Declining Barriers to Entry to 'World Music'

The BBC's story on the success of the song "Despacito" (4.6 Billion streams and counting) suggested that this was emblematic of the the growing internationalism of the popular music industry.

Sir Lucian Grainge, [head of Universal Music Group] said ... "The industry has predominantly been English-speaking artists for the last 50 years [but] streaming will continue to open up music from Latin America artists globally.

This reminded me that his observation has been confirmed recently by a more systematic investigation by Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel, "Pop Internationalism: Has Half a Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?" They show that the traditional bias in overseas markets toward English language songs has declined toward more home country produced songs in the last decade or more. This is likely due to improvements in information technology: the Internet allows consumers to find new music more easily and IT lowers the burdens for musicians to produce and distribute their music.

This has implications for the how talent scouts will search for the next Luis Fonsi.