Popular Music as Cultural Soft Power

Abstract

Globalization has intensified contact between the major cultural groups defined by Toynbee and Huntington. This research measures the asymmetries generated by cultural "soft power" through the consumption of popular music. A soft power capable of promoting lifestyles or socializing in different hierarchies of values. The methodology used was content analysis and its subsequent multivariate statistical treatment. Using the Spotify platform, 177011 songs are analyzed, controlling for language, presence in the charts, as well as the relationship between supply and demand, measured by the number of plays. The English language is hegemonic in most societies of Western culture, identifying European language clusters of a historical nature. Latin America shows a significant cultural differentiation attenuated according to its proximity to the United States of America, finally debating how musical styles are the formalized support of cultural diffusion and soft power.