A study commissioned by the ManyMusics Program of the International Music Council, Paris, and carried out by the Music Council of Australia.

The ManyMusics program of the International Music Council is concerned with fostering musical diversity across the planet.

There is not a lack of musical diversity. Every one of thousands of cultures has music that is distinctive and an important aspect of its identity.

The ManyMusics program would not have been undertaken were there not a perceived threat to this diversity. The perceived threat comes from "globalisation" in its current manifestation.

This study looks at the effects of globalisation on local musics. It especially examines the potential effects of free trade treaties that could deprive governments of the right to give special support to the cultural sector.

Globalisation has been with us for centuries and in hindsight, we can see that musical cultures have been strengthened, altered, extinguished as military or commercial victors exerted their influence or more benignly, simply as one culture came into contact with another.

The urgency felt in this present phase of globalisation probably results from its pace and pervasiveness. In music it is there for (nearly) all to hear in the market and share-of-mind dominance of international popular music promoted across the globe mainly by five transnational record companies based in Europe, the USA and Japan. This music is seen to spread at the cost of local musics -- although there are additional causes for a weakening of local musics perhaps not so directly attributable to globalisation.

This is an enormous subject. What actually are the effects of globalisation on local musics? Despite the obvious fact that the effect of globalisation is the subject of this investigation, the Investigators volunteered relatively little evidence in their respective countries. Given the intensity of the concern, it is surprisingly difficult to produce clear examples. For instance, a lot of change results from urbanisation, and the most evident causes of urbanisation might appear to be local rather than global.

This small project seeks to shed some light by looking at circumstances in five contrasting countries – not so much in order to compare them, but rather to see to what extent globalisation works differently in differing circumstances.

Investigators were engaged in each of the five countries and asked to answer general questions about the structures of musical life in their countries, the role of governments, international trade and exchange of music, and the effects of globalisation with special regard to the actual or potential effects of trade liberalisation treaties. As might be expected, we do not have a tidy set of comparable statistics from the participating countries. So the study is a mixture of statistical data, as available, and factual and impressionistic information. Accepted in those terms, I believe it throws some interesting light on the effects of globalisation on music in the extraordinarily differing circumstances of these countries.

The study was commissioned by and carried out with funding provided by the International Music Council, Paris. The Music Board of the Australia Council also made a small financial contribution.

Richard Letts
Principal Investigator

Read the report (2.7Mb PDF Format) Published October 2003.