Geo­po­li­tics Meets the Music Market: Rising Markets, Shifting Power?

Is the map of the global music market being redrawn? According to the IFPI Global Music Report 2026, China has pushed Germany out of fourth place, Brazil has overtaken Canada to reach eighth, artists from across the African continent are landing in the global charts, and Latin America grew by more than 17 percent, faster than any other region in the world.

The comfortable reading is that certain elements of geopolitics have finally arrived in music. As Daniel Marwecki, author and professor at the University of Hong Kong, puts it: the centuries-long dominance of the West has come to an end, and the new self-confidence of the Global Majority is visible in countries such as China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which no longer accept the back seats of a world order shaped by others.

At the same time, the question arises as to whether streaming platforms and social media have broken down existing structural asymmetries in the global music market, thereby enabling local markets to realise their own economic potential. Yet the infrastructure through which that potential is monetised remains in very few hands, and increasingly those hands are no longer Western. A market can rise in the rankings while ownership stays exactly where it was. 

This session asks: how are geopolitical developments, shifts in economic power, and cultural self-assertion linked to the growth of the music and creative industries? Who captures the value when a market grows? What are the implications for the strategies of Western labels, platforms, and artists, and how is the global sound changing as the Global Majority becomes more self-assured, both partly economically and culturally?