Nation-states, transnational corporations and cosmopolitans in the global popular music economy

Abstract

This article assesses changing debates about globalisation in light of the growth of digital media. It stresses how popular music is shaped by enduring tensions between nation-state attempts to control territorial borders, the power of transnational corporations aiming to operate across these borders and emergent cosmopolitan practices that offer a cultural challenge to these borders. It outlines how popular music is influenced by physical place and highlights the cultural and political importance of the nation-state for understanding the context within which musical creativity occurs. It explains how transnational corporations use financial power to work across and to gain entry to national boundaries, and assesses claims that cosmopolitanism musical encounters offer more inclusive and alternative spaces to that of bounded state control and unbounded capitalist competition. It concludes by arguing for a more music-centred approach to the powers and pluralisms through which popular music moves at the meeting of states, corporations and cosmopolitans.