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We think that globalization is this kind of unstoppable force and you know many people might think that with a global platform like Spotify we're all going to be listening to the same stuff. It's actually not the case. People still seem to have very national or local tastes and if anything that globalization seems to be somewhat in retreat. What you see in all kinds of countries from Europe to Latin America and beyond is that when you look at the top charts in any given country, the share of most successful artists or most successful songs that
come from local artists has been increasing over the years. Comparing 2019 with 2025, we see that everywhere from Brazil to Mexico to Argentina to Colombia to Chile has seen that the share of local artists within that top 20 has increased. So in Brazil it looks like over those six years it's gone from about 16 to 20. Mexico it looks like it went from about six to about 14. And we see that across the board. We see it in Europe as well. We see it in the Nordics. We see it in Western Europe. Um and if you drill down further in Brazil, if you look at not just the top 20,
but the top 100 most streamed artists last week 96 of the top 100 artists in Brazil were Brazilian. I find that gripping. I had no idea that this was the case. If you'd asked me last week, I would have said, "Well, of course, everything is becoming more global. We're all listening to our own countries instead of others." Is that basically the point? I think it's partly a sort of cultural trend in the sense that people want to listen to music that is about their experience and represents their experience. I think language is a big part of it as well actually because this
is a widespread trend, but if you look at some of the exceptions to this trend, it tends to be smaller countries which share their language with much bigger countries. So Portugal is a bit of an exception. The charts in Portugal still remain pretty dominated by Brazilians. Um Ireland is something of an exception. So is Australia. If you look at the charts there, it still is pretty American, a bit British. So I think language is a big part of it. But certainly national identity uh has a role to play here too. I'm going to flip to an example of a
Polish show that we think might exemplify a trend a little similar to the music trend, but this is 1670. This is a Polish comedy uh set in rural Poland in the 17th century. for I mean it's kind of amazing that this show got made and it's what interests me about it is that it really shows how Netflix and other streamers are like this too but Netflix in particular has changed its approach if you went back five or 10 years this show would probably not have been made because back then when Netflix was in the early stage of its international expansion the idea
that they came up with was okay let's try and make shows that everybody likes kind of really global shows and there were some examples of this like they had one called Marco Polo which was all about a European explorer in Asia and you know Amazon had one called Citadel which starred you know a famous Indian actress and a famous British actor going on spy missions in you know different corners of Latin America and you know you could see what they were trying to do but what they found with these shows was that nobody really loved them you know they were fine but nobody
you know they were kind of damp squibs And so in more recent years they have switched Netflix in particular they've switched to a kind of very local first strategy. You know something has to be a huge hit at home before it can go global whether that's adolescence in Britain which was you know very kind of British very gritty kind of thing not obviously aimed at foreigners but after being a huge hit here um it became a huge hit globally and it's won all kinds of awards. Their approach now is to go for these very local hits and hope that some of them translate more
widely. So how is it that this is taking place? So some of it is that people have an appetite for it, but some of it Tom is about technology. I think technology is absolutely crucial to this. And I think particularly if we're talking about video, I mean just so far we've been talking about um studiobacked content. So Netflix, Amazon and so on. But the way that a lot of people watch video now of course is on social platforms. you know, YouTube is starting to eclipse the traditional TV makers, and that's where we really see the new economics of video production. It's just
become so much cheaper to make video than it used to be, so much cheaper to distribute video than it used to be. Um, and that means that there's just been a boom in the supply of local content, which explains why people are watching more local shows. It's because there are more of them. And there was some really interesting research that I came across when uh researching this piece about videos on YouTube that go viral. Um some researchers looked at the trending lists on YouTube in just over a hundred countries over three years and they found that about three quarters of the videos that end up on those trending lists trend
in only one country. In other words, you know, YouTube is this global platform, but the hits, the viral hits still tend to be within national borders. It's very rare that you have something that goes truly global. Does delized culture have a cost? Tom, uh, is it a good thing or a bad thing that taste is less set therefore by those who might be broadcasting culture and set a little bit more by individuals who are choosing what they want to pull towards them. I mean, it's got its pros and cons, but I like the way in which streaming increasingly lets people make
their own choices. So, look at music, for example. In the pre-streaming days, a lot of what people listened to was dictated by people drawing up the schedules for radio. You know, it was DJs that chose what people listened to. And it's interesting that since streaming has come along, one thing that we can see is that sometimes people's tastes, people's preferences are less global than those kind of elite taste makers had assumed. There was a really interesting example that I came across from Germany where um in one recent year on German radio of the 100 most played
songs, only four of them were German. Um but that same year on streaming of the 100 most streamed songs that people had chosen to listen to, 44 of the top 100 were German. So in other words, people's preferences were much less global and much more local than those elite taste makers drawing up the radio schedules had assumed. And I think it's a good thing that people can now express that preference in a way that previously they were unable to do.
