2 academics have produced a study with the catchy title "Pop Internationalism: Has a half century of world music trade displaced local culture?"

Basically they looked at the origin of every song to chart in 22 selected countries between 1960 and 2007 to see the balance between local artists and foreign artists. They wanted to see if local artists were getting displaced by foreigners as music by e.g. US or UK artists got ever easier to obtain.

Maybe a bit surprisingly the opposite seems to be happening -- more people seem to want music by local artists. Foreign artists accounted for 50 per cent of the hits in 1980 but only 30 per cent today. It seems that French increasingly want to listen to French artists, the Germans to German and the Finns to Finns.

Most of these national artists make pop music in styles that are clearly of US origin (and a growing number sing in English) but the findings suggest small might be beautiful -- artists from smaller countries are taking a growing share of world sales relative to GDP.

Anyway, the study is here if you want to know more. Warning! contains sums.