Latin American contraflow in global entertainment media: Kingdom Rush

In order to shed some light on how Latin American entrepreneurs are developing products for a globalised market and attempting to overcome cultural discount by making their products more universal in their appeal, we analyse the cases of the video game Kingdom Rush from Uruguay and the Zambo Dende audio-visual project from Colombia. To provide context, the flow of entertainment media products from Latin America is first considered, with two cases then presented in order to provide insight into the processes of economic contra-flow and cultural transduction. Based on an examination of the products and in-depth interviews with the creators (and also survey responses in the case of Kingdom Rush), the findings reveal the various challenges faced by and the achievements of these small-scale entrepreneurs to reach a global market. We pay particular attention to the way in which the products achieve global appeal to mitigate negative effects associated with the geographical and cultural origin of a product

The diffusion of music via YouTube: Comparing Asian and European music video charts

This research aims to study what role YouTube – arguably the largest and most popular video sharing website in the world – plays in the globalization of pop music. As a transnational medium, the internet has the potential to diminish the impact of cultural centrality and cultural proximity in explaining cultural flows. We conducted an empirical analysis of YouTube’s music video charts. In particular, we focused on the transnational music flows between Europe and Asia, with special attention paid to the positions of Japan and South Korea. The former is the second largest music market in the world, while the latter is increasingly associated with successfully exporting its local pop music (K-pop) in the digital era. The results show that the internet has closed the gap between cultures from different parts of the world to only a limited extent. At the same time, we found that artists from South Korea had the strongest presence in the South-East Asian charts, with greater cultural centrality than the US and Japan. The implications of these findings are discussed below