The author is the author of Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of Disruption.

The UK can proudly claim to be one of only four music exporters in the world, along with the US, Sweden and most recently South Korea. But while the company has produced global stars every year, it hasn’t had true global success since Dua Lipa in 2017. What’s changed? Glocalization: A tongue-in-cheek hybrid of globalization and localization whose impact will be felt for years to come, not just in the music industry.

Remember how the more familiar globalization was supposed to work. As global brands like McDonald’s and Starbucks take hold in increasingly homogenized societies, richer countries will use their first-mover advantage over poorer countries to make the world “flat,” or at least flatter.

In the arts, believing in this logic has led peculiar markets such as France to resort to coercive measures, fearing the domination of others.exceptional cultureQuota policy to protect the cultural industry in the local media.

So much for theory. In fact, we are now learning that the world is not flat after all. In a recent paper, Chris Dara Riva and I uncovered clear and startling evidence that local music is thriving on global streaming platforms in each country. This dynamic didn’t exist in an era when our neighborhood record shops and radio stations controlled what got our attention. British artists may have dominated the UK charts last year, but Germans, French and Italians dominated their home markets, just to name three.

Additionally, local chart-toppers are increasingly performing in their native language. Sweden, an early adopter of streaming, was dominated by Swedes performing in Swedish last year. Ten years ago neither the Swedes nor their language were in the majority.

Polish artists now dominate the Polish charts, mostly playing the American genre of hip-hop. Localization of artists, but globalization of genres.

Here we return to glocalization, a term popularized by sociologist Roland Robertson in 1995. Robertson argued with astonishing foresight that the proliferation of “ethnic” supermarkets in California is not flattening the world, but rather turning the global into the local.

“Diversity is for sale,” declared Mr. Robertson. Perhaps he saw Koreans avoiding McDonald’s in Los Angeles’ Koreatown because they wanted unique foods associated with their culture and hometown.

Robertson passed away a year ago, but the globalization of music has given new life to his counterintuitive insight. On the supply side, borderless digital streaming has reduced production and distribution costs, making local music investments more profitable. On the demand side, consumers shy away from linear “one-to-many” broadcasting models like radio and TV (in favor of interactive on-demand streaming (choose what you want).

The music industry was the first to suffer from digital disruption and the first to recover. It determines the mood of the media. But other high-profile fields such as audiobooks, television and movies are also feeling the impact of glocalization. His Netflix investment in his content city of 22,000 square meters Madrid has made it the largest of its kind in Europe.

All these influences go far beyond the media. Steve Boom, who runs a number of Amazon’s media services, said glocalization trends “seem to be in line with broader societal trends that are becoming more tribal as they become more global.” concludes. It seems to me that the world is not flat, it is cracked.

All of this poses a thorny problem for policy makers. Music and video streaming has achieved a politically desired outcome: domestic prominence, without government intervention. Ironically, these unregulated global markets succeeded while local radio and television regulated markets failed. Will glocalization go backwards once governments start regulating these streaming platforms?

This brings us back to Britain, and the English-speaking countries across the Atlantic. For more than her century, English has served as the comparative advantage of the United States and Great Britain in the creative industries. The rest of the world listened (and watched) creative content done in our native language. Those days are over and will never come back. Glocalization means it’s no longer so easy in the English-speaking world.