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.” 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. 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.