Tents are being packed, wellies wiped down and joints rolled up in preparation for the Roskilde festival, a hedonistic week of music and culture which begins on June 27th in eastern Denmark. The line-up is as international as ever, featuring the Cure (Britain), Addison Rae (America), Jennie of Blackpink (South Korea) and scores of other acts from Australia’s Folk Bitch Trio to the Pili Pili Girls of Tanzania.
Yet eavesdrop on the private playlists of Danish festivalgoers and you may hear a more local soundtrack. Nine of the ten most-streamed tracks in Denmark in 2025 were by Danes, belting out lyrics in Danish. The top hit was “Hele Vejen” (“All the Way”), by Danes Omar and Mumle.
It might seem surprising, in a world of global stars, that the 6m Danes, many of whom are fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently they did not. In 2019 only five songs in Denmark’s top 20 were in Danish. By last year the figure was 18.
A similar trend is under way in other countries—and in other forms of entertainment. From Asia to the Americas, music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. Hollywood television-streaming companies are commissioning more local productions in foreign markets, causing consumption of American shows to fall. Social networks are connecting the whole world, but so far people are mainly using them to consume local content. And as video gaming expands, it too is becoming increasingly tailored to local cultures.
For those who thought that globalisation would lead to a stale, worldwide monoculture, in which everyone heard, watched and played the same things, the local revival is something of a surprise. Global audiences can still be commanded by a handful of stars and events, such as the men’s football World Cup with an audience of billions. Yet they are becoming the exception. As global streaming platforms permeate new markets, local culture is proving remarkably resistant. America’s grip on worldwide popular culture is loosening. And in some cases, new technology is pushing the globalisation of entertainment unexpectedly into reverse.
Spotify, which turned 20 this year, offers virtually all music to anyone with an internet connection. As users can listen to anything at no marginal cost, the biggest stars have got only bigger. Global digital distribution has turbocharged the fame of singers like Taylor Swift, who have seen their royalty earnings rise faster than those lower down the entertainment food-chain.
Any way you want it
Yet streaming seems to be having another, less obvious effect. As digital distribution spreads to more households in more countries, the biggest stars are a more varied bunch than in the past. Spotify’s global top 50 last year included songs in 16 languages, more than double the number in 2020.
The Danes are not the only ones marching to their own beat. In 2023 Will Page and Chris Dalla Riva noted in a London School of Economics paper that a number of European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Poland had seen rising domestic shares of their top tens in the preceding decade. Since then the phenomenon seems to have spread. Mr Page, formerly chief economist at Spotify, finds that 55% of streams of songs in Sweden’s top 20 last year were in Swedish, up from 29% in 2019. Norway’s figure rose from 13% to 38% in the same period.
Latin America has gone the same way (see chart 1), Brazil astonishingly so: in the first week of June 96 of the top 100 artists on YouTube Music in the country were Brazilian (foreigners included Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson). Last year Thailand had a solidly local top ten, while Indonesia and the Philippines each had eight local tracks in their respective charts; Nigeria’s top ten were all local, as were nine of South Africa’s, according to the IFPI, which represents the recorded-music industry.
Hindi’s share of music streaming is falling in India—because listeners are tuning in to even more local tracks, in languages like Malayalam and Odia, according to EY, a professional-services firm. Exceptions to the local trend include tiny countries and those that share their language with a bigger one. Ireland and Australia’s charts are dominated by other English-speaking countries; Portugal’s, by Brazilians.
What is going on? On the supply side, digital technology has demolished barriers to entry that existed in the era when recording and distributing music required a deal with a record company. In the CD age, economies of scale ruled: turning a biggish American act into a global one made more financial sense than developing a domestic niche like Danish hip-hop. Streaming allows those niches to be profitably filled.
At the same time, the economics of the music industry have turned in favour of keeping it local. Live gigs, once a way to drum up sales of CDs, have become a major source of revenue, and touring locally is cheaper than travelling the world. Artists are keener than ever to cultivate “superfans” who splurge on merchandise and who act as mini-promoters on social media. The need to rev up that kind of community means that it is better to be concentratedly popular with 6m Danes than sparsely popular with 6m people globally.
On the demand side, people’s listening is increasingly guided by algorithms rather than tastemakers on TV or the radio. Algorithms funnel billions of streams to top artists like Ms Swift, but they also drive people more deeply into niches. TV and radio producers sometimes seem to have assumed that listeners’ preferences would be more global than they really were. In 2023 German songs accounted for only four of the country’s top 100 radio plays, but 44 of its 100 most-streamed songs, notes Mr Page. “Ironically, it’s these unregulated markets which have achieved what intervention in regulated markets failed” at, he says. “Domestic prominence”.
Global firms are adapting. In the past two years Sony Music has opened offices in Greece, the Czech Republic and Dubai, and has made deals with locally focused labels in Germany, Denmark and France. Universal has invested in local catalogues such as RS Group, Thailand’s second-largest music collection. Warner Music has hired more talent scouts in countries like Mexico. Its local boss there, Rubén Abraham, has vowed not to “tropicalise” Mexican music for export, arguing that “when the foundation is authentic, the music connects far beyond its original territory.”
That’s the way you need it
Television bosses have been drawing similar conclusions. In the early stages of its global expansion, Netflix had a brief spell of trying to make shows that were universal. “Marco Polo” (2014) dramatised the Asian adventures of the Venetian explorer. “Sense8” (2015) followed eight psychically linked strangers from around the world (or at least from major streaming markets). Such fare did not hit the spot. “What you realise is, maybe there isn’t a global show,” says Larry Tanz, Netflix’s head of content in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The company saw that “when we try to make things for everybody, maybe that’s not going to work in the long term.”
Instead it has pushed into hyper-local stories aimed at local audiences. “1670”, a Monty Python-esque comedy set in 17th-century Poland, may have baffled executives in Los Angeles, but Netflix’s local commissioning team got it—and it has become a Polish hit. “Troll” is a very Norwegian tale of monsters in the mountains. Series stay authentic with the help of local executives—the company has a dozen offices in Europe and Africa—and local testing. Shows are tried out on Netflix subscribers in-country rather than on test audiences in theatres in California.
Other streamers are doing much the same. Amazon has made big bets in Latin America. Warner Bros commissioned local shows ahead of streaming launches in Italy, Germany and Turkey this year. Whereas six years ago 70% of the shows commissioned by global streaming platforms were North American, in the first quarter of this year only 36% were, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm (see chart 2). By Ampere’s reckoning, last year Netflix made more foreign-language shows than English ones for the first time.
As streamers push deeper into foreign markets, local shows help them reach subscribers beyond the elites who might have been happy with American fare. They are also cheaper to make. With a reported budget of $6.3m, “Troll” was lavish by Norwegian standards but a bargain in American terms. Mr Tanz says that most productions are budgeted such that they will be financially successful even if they don’t travel far beyond their local market.
As in the music business, executives have concluded that the best chance of having a global hit is to make something authentically local. “Adolescence” was binged around the world because, not in spite of, its gritty Britishness, argues Mr Tanz. He says Netflix’s data show that you never get a global hit that has not first been intensely popular in its home country. “You need a burning hot core,” not “tepid flames just dispersed around”, he says. Shows need superfans just as musicians do.
The upshot is that viewers are watching less American entertainment. American shows’ share of global demand for TV series fell from 51% in 2022 to 42% last year, calculates Parrot Analytics, which measures demand based on consumption, search and social interactions. In countries big enough to attract commissions from streamers, local consumption is rising. Digital i, a data firm, finds that on Netflix and Amazon Prime, local content’s share of viewership rose from 28% in 2021 to 39% in 2025 in Spain, and from 14% to 20% in Britain. By its measure nine of Netflix’s ten most-watched shows or movies in Japan and South Korea last year were local fare.
As with music, countries that share a language with a bigger neighbour struggle. Local content accounts for less than 4% of Australians’ Netflix viewing, reckons Digital i; Canada’s share is similarly low. Australia last year announced a new requirement that streamers spend a minimum amount on local content; the European Union has a similar rule.
The local trend is not as universal as in the music industry, since making a TV series is a lot more expensive than recording a song. Netflix boasts that it has made shows in more than 50 countries—but that still leaves about 150 more to go. Between 2022 and 2025, 89% of countries saw a rise in the share of demand for shows from foreign countries other than America, finds Christofer Hamilton of Parrot. “America’s dominant role as content supplier to the world is slipping,” he says.
For a sense of where things may be heading, consider user-generated video on social networks. Platforms like YouTube already feature hours of content from every country in the world. Yet consumption patterns appear to be stubbornly local. Alexandre Goncalves and Yee Man Margaret Ng of the University of Illinois analysed YouTube’s “trending” lists in 104 countries between 2022 and 2025. Of the 726,627 videos on the lists, three-quarters “trended” (went viral) in only one country. Going truly global was almost unheard of: just three videos trended everywhere (an Apple product launch, a MrBeast contest and a Blackpink music video).
As in music, consumption seems to be localising even at a sub-national level. Ashish Pherwani of EY reports that in India, where around 95% of content consumed on YouTube is in Indian languages, more than half the content produced in the country is in tongues other than Hindi.
You can go your own way
As the youngest entertainment mass medium, gaming has changed the most in recent years. A generation ago games were sold in boxes to a niche audience of young people who played them on expensive hardware. Now they are distributed digitally (often free of charge) to a mass audience of gamers playing on smartphones. Over 3.5bn people play, a figure that has doubled in little more than a decade.
With more gamers and cheaper distribution have come many more titles. In the six years to 2025, the annual number of PC game releases more than doubled, found Matthew Ball (recently named chief strategy officer at Xbox, Microsoft’s gaming division). The growing amount of time spent playing has been going mainly to the long tail of smaller titles. Between 2022 and 2025, time spent playing the 20 most popular PC games fell by 1%, while time spent on games outside the top 20 increased by 44%, calculates Newzoo, a firm of analysts.
Despite this lengthening tail, gaming on PCs and consoles remains fairly similar from country to country. Titles like “Fortnite”, “Roblox” and “Minecraft” appear in top tens across America and Europe. Yet on mobile, which has a far larger audience, regional tastes become more apparent. Data from Sensor Tower, which tracks app usage, show that across the five biggest gaming markets—America, China, Japan, Britain and South Korea—no single game was in every country’s top ten (by monthly users) last year. Their top tens had 34 different titles. Some countries had highly culturally specific games. India’s top ten included a game based on carrom, a popular tabletop game on the subcontinent.
Country-specific titles are helped along by Apple and Google’s app stores, which provide recommendations by country, says Manu Rosier of Newzoo. And whereas the PC and console audience in most emerging markets is too small to justify local titles, the smartphone’s ubiquity means that “region-first design pays back”, he says.
Garena, the Singapore-based developer of “Free Fire”, has used this to its advantage. This last-shooter-standing game is relatively little-played in America and Europe, where “Fortnite” is preferred. But, thanks to a huge following in Asia and Latin America, last year “Free Fire” had more worldwide users than any mobile game bar Roblox, says Sensor Tower.
The game is tailored to address pain points in emerging markets, Garena says. It is optimised for lower-end devices, with less storage and weaker processing power. (Programmers made adjustments after a player in Mexico showed them how he had to play next to a fan to cool down his phone.) Many gamers in these regions lack credit cards or bank accounts, so Garena introduced alternatives such as pre-paid cards and phone-company billing.
Garena has also adapted its content for local tastes. Whereas “Fortnite” holds special events during mainly Western festivals like Halloween and Christmas, and features content from films such as “Back to the Future”, “Free Fire” organises equivalents aimed at other parts of the world. Last year it celebrated 50 years of “Sholay”, a classic Bollywood movie, by introducing items from the film into the game. It holds events around the Rio Carnival, Diwali and Ramadan (in which players can give alms by completing in-game challenges). In-country staff spot local crazes. Last year, when a video of a boy dancing at the head of an Indonesian racing boat went viral on TikTok, “Free Fire” gave players the ability to perform the dance in the game.
“The assumption that American game makers would indefinitely set the terms of global interactive entertainment—culturally, commercially, technologically—is no longer operative,” wrote Joost van Dreunen of New York University’s Stern School of Business, in a recent essay on the decline of “Fortnite”. “The audiences they cultivated are moving on. And the competitors they ignored are now eating their lunch.”
Chief among the lunch-eaters is China. Chinese gamemakers have increased their share of the non-China market from 10.7% to 14% in the past six years. China’s publishers “have taken the mobile gaming world by storm”, says Sam Aune of Sensor Tower, which counts two Chinese firms in the top three globally by in-app revenue (see chart 3). Mr Aune has tallied the highest-earning mobile games so far this year in the ten largest markets. Two Chinese-made titles—“Kingshot”, a strategy game, and “Gossip Harbor”, a puzzle game—are in the top ten in eight countries.
Yet so far China’s power in the games market has not resulted in the transmission of much Chinese culture. Indeed, in order to succeed abroad, Chinese publishers have had to make games that are totally different from those they sell at home. Nine of the top ten games in China are not found in any other big market’s top ten, says Mr Aune. Most generate virtually all their revenue at home. Many overseas hits have loosely adopted the culture of their target markets: “Kingshot” seems set in medieval Europe, while the characters and setting of “Gossip Harbor” recall America.
In music, video and interactive entertainment, global tech platforms have made it easier than ever to distribute entertainment around the world. Yet the sheer abundance of content that these platforms have helped to generate means that, more than ever, global audiences are able to assert distinctively local preferences.
