The Globalization of Popular Music

Take music. Today, American pop star Taylor Swift is arguably the most famous person in the world, partly due to the advancement in technology and streaming music services. Demand for Taylor Swift concert tickets in France was so large that it crashed Ticketmaster France’s website in the summer of 2023. “Swifties,” as her fans are known, would be rioting in the streets of Paris if the Macron government prohibited French fans from streaming Swift’s music on Spotify or banned her from performing concerts in the country.

In early 2024, an international diplomatic spat erupted among governments over the American pop star’s services. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Singapore government offered significant financial incentives for the American pop star to perform exclusively in the city-state instead of in other Southeast Asian countries. Thailand and other regional governments made clear their unhappiness over the arrangement. Singapore defended the exclusive arrangement by claiming that the additional tourism and spending generated by Swift’s concerts outweighed the cost of the financial incentives. In other words, a foreign government subsidized a very wealthy American to provide services in its country—much to the chagrin of neighboring countries. Yet the Taylor Swift global phenomenon is not new. It follows a playbook similar to that of the Beatles, who supercharged the globalization of popular music in the 1960s. In short, the cultural globalization genie, particularly music, has long been out of the bottle.

At its best, music has always been a blend of cultures and influences. Blues and jazz, for example, were genres largely created by black musicians who fused musical elements from the Americas, Europe, and Africa, including traditions brought to the United States by enslaved people. Yet a truly comprehensive analysis of the globalization of music—from German classical composers to the creation of the phonograph to migration to the rise of the internet—is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, it will trace how popular music became globalized, with particular attention paid to the Beatles. No musical artist or group has embodied and defined the globalization of popular music like the iconic British band.

Following World War II, the United States was the world’s dominant economic and military power. During the late 1940s and into the 1950s, during the formative years of what eventually became the Beatles, American art was also ascending. American visual artists like Jackson Pollock were globally recognized, Hollywood was becoming what we think of it as today, and—most importantly for this essay—rock and roll was born, which originated from African American music like rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, and country music. By the late 1940s, more than half the records in the world were made and sold in the United States.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey—better known as Ringo Starr—were all born during the early 1940s, the height of World War II, in the port city of Liverpool, England. They grew up in working-class neighborhoods in the aftermath of the war. As Europe began its post-war recovery, record sales started to explode in the region. Like many British kids at the time, the Fab Four all gained their first exposure to American rock and roll via the radio, which was broadcast into Liverpool from across the channel on Radio Luxembourg. Most influential were American artists Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly. In fact, Lennon and McCartney, the band’s two primary songwriters, first bonded over their shared love of American country music and early rock and roll.

The Beatles evolved from a band called the Quarrymen, which Lennon formed in 1956. In 1960, the band that would become the Beatles was offered an opportunity to travel abroad and play professionally in Hamburg, Germany. During this early period, with greased-back hair and leather motorcycle jackets, the Beatles’ aesthetic borrowed heavily from Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One, a popular American film at the time.

In Hamburg, another port city, they became the house band in a strip club and played at various other bars and music halls in the city. Around this time, the Beatles were introduced to French existentialist philosophers like Cocteau and Camus, and their aesthetic changed—replacing greased-back hair with the early mop-top, a “French cut … that was worn in German art schools and universities.” About this period, Lennon once said, “I grew up in Hamburg, not Liverpool.” By 1962, the band had returned to England and signed a record contract with a British label, EMI Parlophone, in March of that year.

It was a tale of cultural globalization and migration: British teens heavily influenced by American rock and roll and Hollywood fashion and then French philosophy and fashion honing their skills in Germany and returning to remake music back in England—and eventually conquering the musical world.

In March 1963, the Beatles released their debut album Please Please Me. The album remained in the British top 10 for over a year. By the fall of 1963, the group was starting to achieve success outside of the United Kingdom. They had topped the charts in Australia, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, and Hong Kong and grossed more than $17,500,000 internationally (or nearly $180,000,000 adjusted for inflation).

Yet the United States was something of a relative laggard in its enthusiasm for the Beatles. Much of this was driven by a pervasive nationalist assumption in the American record industry that foreign acts couldn’t sell in the United States. They would soon learn how wrong they were. Capitol Records, an American subsidiary of EMI Parlophone, had the option to release the Beatles music but initially passed. Transglobal Inc., a clearinghouse, purchased the rights to several Beatles songs and then leased them to a small independent label out of Chicago called Vee Jay, which failed to gain traction with those songs. Other labels, including Swan and Tollie, had the rights to the Beatles songs in the United States, and eventually, Capitol exercised the right to release some of the material. It was a confusing legal mess but ultimately proved fortuitous for the Beatles.

On February 1, 1964, the Beatles scored their first number-one hit—“I Want to Hold Your Hand”—in the United States. Six days later, the band arrived in New York City from London and were greeted by thousands of screaming fans. Two days after that, the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show and reached an audience of an estimated 73 million Americans—or about 40 percent of all Americans at the time. Watching that night from Gainesville, Florida, was a young boy named Tom Petty, who later said that the Beatles’ performance on the show “changed everything.”

By early April, the Beatles had 12 songs on the Billboard chart, including the top five songs. Usually a label won’t release multiple singles at the same time, but because multiple record labels held the rights to the Beatles music, the result was something of a free-for-all when the Beatles began to break. As Sam Lebovic notes in his 2017 Journal of American Studies essay, “Here, There and Everywhere”: The Beatles, America, and Cultural Globalization, 1964–1968”:

Demand for Beatles records was so great that Capitol Records had to subcontract record pressing to its primary rivals, RCA and MGM. In other words, the Beatles were a tremendous financial success for the American recording industry, as well as record stores. This perhaps helps explain why there was no protectionist response to the Fab Four’s success.

About $50 million (or about $500 million adjusted for inflation) worth of Beatles merchandise was sold to American fans in the immediate aftermath. Life magazine declared, “In ’76 England lost her American colonies, [but] last week the Beatles took them back.” Variety, an entertainment publication, noted in February that the Beatles, “fundamentally shook up and globalized the music biz.” By August 1964, it is estimated that the band had sold 80 million albums worldwide, and by February 1965, they had sold more than 100 million albums worldwide.

Over the next several years, Beatlemania hit overdrive. The band continued to record new commercially successful albums and play to adoring fans all over the world. At the same time, they were pushing the envelope for the delivery of music. Shortly after the Beatles released arguably their masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the summer of 1967, they played live on the BBC and European Broadcasting Union, which was the first international satellite broadcast of a television show. The performance of “All You Need is Love” featured a chorus consisting of Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Keith Moon of the Who, and Marianne Faithful and was broadcast to 24 countries simultaneously—a tremendous feat given technical limitations at the time.

Not only influenced by the globalization of music, fashion, and ideas, the Beatles helped expand the globalization of those very things.

More than virtually every musical act at the time, the Beatles were truly a global phenomenon. They toured all over the world in a way that few acts did, which was driven by—and further cemented—their global reach (Figure 1).

Following their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles performed a few more East Coast dates and then toured heavily around the UK in the spring and summer of 1964. Later that summer, they played in Hong Kong as well as Australia before heading back to the United States for West Coast dates. They finished the year back playing in the UK.

In 1965, the Beatles played all over Europe in the early part of the year and then came to North America in the late summer. The Beatles finished the year touring across the United Kingdom.

In 1966, the Beatles embarked on their final tour. The initial leg included 13 dates in Germany, Japan, and the Philippines, followed by 18 concerts in North America (16 in the United States and two in Canada). In Tokyo, about 200,000 fans applied for 30,000 tickets. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the Beatles played for 80,000 fans in one day—a truly staggering figure at the time.

The tour was marred by controversies. In the United States, there was a backlash to John Lennon’s March 1966 quip that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” In Japan, there was intense debate about whether the culturally conservative nation should welcome the British band to an esteemed venue like Nippon Budokan, which is situated between the Yasukuni Shrine and the Imperial Palace. Fearing massive protests from conservatives, the government had to deploy approximately 35,000 police officers, and eventually, Prime Minister Eisaku Satō called for the shows to be canceled. The shows, however, went on since the contract had already been signed.

In the Philippines, the Beatles refused an invitation to the Malacañang Palace and the opportunity to meet the president and first lady of the country, which was in keeping with the band’s policy of refusing official government visits during tours. The snub was viewed poorly in the press, and the Beatles faced significant backlash, including death threats.

After the 1966 tour and the various controversies that ensued, the Beatles quit touring—preferring instead to make studio albums and begin experimenting sonically, which is widely considered their most innovative period. But their international traveling days and global influence were far from over.

Today, Taylor Swift travels all over the world performing for adoring crowds and, like the Beatles, occasionally creates international controversies. Meanwhile, foreign artists find massive demand in the United States. Indeed, successful musicians tour all over the world, but that wasn’t always the case. In fact, the Beatles were very much at the forefront of global travel by popular musical acts. Facilitated by the spread of their music across borders and the relative ease of international travel made possible by technological advancements, the Beatles were in demand all over the world. In other words, the triumph of the Beatles was at least in part a triumph of globalization.

As Lebovic notes, “The international success of the Beatles had become self-reproducing—the scale of their market allowed them to borrow from an ever-expanding cultural palette, which in turn helped to expand the scale of their market.” And by 1965, the Beatles were increasingly interested in India—and Eastern practices.

In 1965, the Beatles released Rubber Soul, which included a John Lennon–composed song called “Norwegian Wood.” It was the first pop song to feature a sitar—a stringed instrument popular in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—played by George Harrison on the recording. The follow-up album, 1965’s Revolver, began a string of Harrison-composed songs that were heavily influenced by Indian music. The first track was “Love You To,” which Harrison composed entirely on a sitar. Modeling its arrangement on North Indian classical music, the recording “features Indian musicians playing the tanpura (plucked string instrument) and the table (percussion instrument).” David Reck, a former professor at Amherst College, wrote of the song, “One cannot emphasize how absolutely unprecedented this piece is in the history of popular music. For the first time Asian music was not parodied utilizing familiar stereotypes and misconceptions, but rather transferred in toto into its new environment with sympathy and rare understanding.” (Table 1 below lists some instruments from the Indian subcontinent that the Beatles used in their recordings.)

A year later, on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles released a Harrison-composed song called “Within You Without You,” which “features Indian instruments played by Indian musician and a Western string ensemble playing in conversational texture (call and response interaction among instruments,” and uses several Indian musical genres, rhythmic patterns, and time signatures. Scholars point out that a number of the Beatles’ other compositions frequently contain subtle and unnoticed Indian aspects, including “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which “features a swarmandal (a string instrument in Hindustani music similar to a harp),” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” and “Across the Universe,” which includes Lennon using an Indian mantra “Jai guru deva om,” which roughly translates to “Hail to the devine guru” in the pre-chorus.

Though the Beatles had experimented with Indian influences in their own music, they had not spent much time in India. In August 1967, Harrison and his wife attended a lecture in London to hear the Maharishi speak about Transcendental Meditation. Harrison then convinced the other members of the Beatles that they should decamp from London to the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, to study the mantra-based meditation in early 1968. Here the Beatles were—in the prime of their careers and arguably the most famous people in the world at the time—leaving their home in London to study meditation with a guru in a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas. The Beatles spent about two months in India, meditating daily and listening to the Maharishi “lecture about reincarnation and consciousness.” The trip was widely covered in the press, and Life magazine declared 1968 to be “‘The Year of the Guru,’ and featured the Maharishi on the cover with groovy, hallucinogenic spirals framing his face.’”

Given the Beatles’ massive fame and genuine curiosity, interest in Indian music and traditions was clearly on the rise. Within a few years, the Beatles’ contemporaries were making Indian-inspired music, including the Rolling Stones with “Paint It Black,” which features a sitar, Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” and the Moody Blues released an entire Indian-inspired album called In Search of the Last Chord. Likewise, Ravi Shankar, the famous Indian sitar player, played at Woodstock in 1969.

And it wasn’t just music. It is estimated that by the mid-1970s, the Transcendental Meditation movement was estimated to have 600,000 devotees, with the Maharishi’s techniques and vision promoted by celebrities such as Shirley MacLaine and football star Joe Namath. Indeed, scholars point to the Beatles’ absorption and promotion of Indian practices and traditions as a partial explanation for the explosion of yoga and meditation centers in Western countries.

Author Philip Goldberg wrote in his book American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Medication—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West that the trip to study under the Maharishi “may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness.” Though perhaps a bit hyperbolic, it is clear that the Beatles did help spread Indian spiritual practices to a wider Western audience. In his book on how the year 1965 changed music history, Andrew Grant Jackson wrote, “It was George Harrison’s songs espousing Hindu philosophy and featuring Indian musicians, and the Beatles’ study of Transcendental Meditation … [that] helped expand the freedom of religion the United States was founded on to encompass options outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

The Beatles were influenced by Indian spiritual practices and musical techniques, which they used to write experimental songs that were popular worldwide. They used their fame to help globalize interest in Indian culture, Hindu spiritual traditions, and other Eastern practices that are still popular today.

It is hard to overstate how influential the Beatles were on subsequent music artists around the world, particularly in North America and the United Kingdom. The shape and fabric of popular music today would not exist in its current form without the Beatles. Even artists who sound nothing like the Beatles are nevertheless influenced by the musical world the band created.

In the United States and Canada, the list of musical artists that cite the Beatles as influences is extremely long and includes globally successful artists such as the Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson (who co-wrote three songs with Paul McCartney in the early 1980s and then subsequently purchased the publishing rights to the majority of the Beatles catalog), Nirvana (the Beatles song “In My Life” was played at Kurt Cobain’s funeral), Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell. Indeed, Taylor Swift has cited McCartney as one of her greatest influences.

As Beatlemania spread around the world, London quickly displaced the United States as the epicenter for pop and rock and roll music. By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, based on the success of the Beatles, London-based artists, including the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Badfinger, David Bowie, and Black Sabbath—all of whom were influenced by the Beatles—achieved significant worldwide commercial and critical success.

Owing to advances in technology and the internet in particular, music today is more popular and more accessible than ever before. Streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube—not to mention social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok—have largely displaced purchasing physical copies of vinyl records, eight tracks, cassettes, and compact discs. In fact, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), streaming made up 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States in 2023 (Figure 2). As of March 2024, more than 600 songs have more than a billion streams on Spotify. The Weeknd’s song “Blinding Lights” is the most streamed song of all time on the platform with over 4.1 billion plays. In 2023, there were 4.1 trillion streamed songs worldwide, which represented a 22.3 percent increase from 2022.

Nearly anyone in the world with an internet connection can hear any music they want at any time facilitated by technology. Take the app Shazam, which was founded by four people of varying backgrounds: two American-born Cal Berkeley MBA students; a Stanford electrical engineering PhD graduate; and a London-based, Indian-born internet consultant. The company was founded in London and is still headquartered in London, though it was purchased by Apple in 2018 for $400 million. When a person connected to the internet via a smartphone hears a song they like but do not recognize, they can turn on Shazam, which listens to a very short snippet of the song, identifies it using an algorithm, and then pulls up the song automatically on Apple Music. Gone are the days when a person had to remember the lyrics, type them into a search engine, and hope it led them to the right song.

And it’s not just songs in English that are exported around the world. Plenty of songs sung in foreign languages have become major hits in the American music market. Driven by a music video that has received over five billion views since its 2012 release, South Korean singer Psy’s smash “Gangnam Style” hit number one on the iTunes charts in 31 countries. Since then, numerous other “K‑Pop” bands singing in Korean have become popular in the United States and around the world. In 2017, “Despacito,” a song sung in Spanish by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi and Puerto Rican rapper Yankee Daddy topped Billboard’s charts for 16 weeks.

Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny is a massive global artist. In fact, in 2020, 2021, and 2022, he was the most-streamed artist in the world on Spotify. Bad Bunny was slightly eclipsed by Taylor Swift in 2023. He was the first non-English language artist to hold that title. In 2022, his songs were streamed 18.5 billion times on Spotify, and his album Un Verano Sin Ti is the single most-streamed album on Spotify, with over 15 billion streams as of December 2023. Bad Bunny was one of six Spanish language artists with over a billion streams in 2023. Nearly half of Spotify’s top 10 most-streamed artists of 2023 were of Hispanic origin (Table 2).

In April 2024, the Latin American Music Awards (AMA) was presented in both English and Spanish, which is the first time a major US awards show was shown on a bilingual broadcast. As Axios noted, “Unlike most awards shows, winners for the Latin AMAs are selected by popular vote, not fellow artists” and the “Latin AMAs have attracted more US viewers than the American Music Awards” demonstrates the growing demand for Spanish and Latino music in the United States. The RIAA reported in April 2024 that Latin music revenues in the United States hit an all-time high in 2023 of $1.4 billion—up from $1.1 billion in 2022.

Today, the growth of Latin music outpaces the growth of overall recorded music sales in the United States. The RIAA estimates that Latin music represents about 8 percent total share of music in the United States, up substantially from 5.9 percent in 2021. As CBS News recently reported, “US listeners are streaming more non-English music … [and] the fastest growing audio streaming genres were world and Latin, which saw increases of 26 percent and 24 percent respectively compared to 2022.”

There are plenty of other examples of non-English songs becoming globally popular, and many more are sure to follow. In short, music today both is wholly dependent on globalization and helps fuel cultural globalization on a massive scale.

In both style and delivery, much has changed since the days of tribal or classical music performed in Africa or Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. Thanks to the internet, it is now possible to instantly hear obscure music from all over the world. Musicians continue to tour globally and use new methods to distribute their music but largely follow the Beatles’ groundbreaking work.

Indeed, it’s hard to overstate the band’s importance in terms of the spread of popular music around the world. As Dr. Michael Weis, a history professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, noted, “The Beatles, in a lot of ways, were the first truly globalized entertainment act.” They are arguably the most successful musical act of all time. In 2012, it was estimated that the Beatles had sold more than 600 million records, cassette tapes, and compact discs. In Rolling Stone’s 2021 ranking of the 500 greatest songs, the Beatles had 12—the most by far. Likewise, the Beatles had 9 of the top 500 albums of all time according to Rolling Stone’s 2023 edition of the ranking—the most of any artist.

The kids from Liverpool were influenced by early American rock and roll, took early fashion cues from American cinema and then French philosophers, honed their skills in German strip clubs, became a global phenomenon performing to adoring crowds all over the world, studied Eastern meditation in India, incorporated Indian music into their own, and in the process, influenced everything from music to yoga. The band helped shape the globalized world in which we live today.

Today, music is more accessible than ever before—and it is increasing in popularity. At its best, music—and cultural globalization more broadly—helps break down barriers while building bridges among people worldwide. Music is both a product of globalization and an important contributor to it.