[Balero]

Well yeah, looking at popular music will do that. There's a massive amount of advertising money to make it popular.

Look at the less forced genres of music. Rap in the USA, Grime in the UK, similar but different. The UK has a very different type of indie (named from coming from an independent label) music. And Country is only popular in the USA.

If you have a quick look on the surface it can be similar, but if you look deeper, where it matters, then the variation is there.

That said, I do think having more languages is better, a more diversified ecosystem is more likely to survive. And from my point of view, it's more interesting to live in.

[krapp]

Also, styles of music aren't equivalent to the culture that produced them.

American rock has its roots in Jazz and Bluegrass, which has its roots in the African slave diaspora. Japanese Visual Kei was influenced heavily by American glam rock bands. Does that mean Visual Kei merely an imitation of American culture, or that it expresses the same things that American rock does? Of course not. You can borrow the sound and the style but still make something culturally unique.

K-Pop is probably more "Americanized" than Japanese pop, but it's still distinctly not American. I don't think anyone would confuse either Japanese or Korean culture for American culture, even though both incorporate Western aesthetics and English into their cultural expressions.

[jejones3141]

I'm kind of sorry to hear that about country music; some time ago I occasionally caught a country show on, I swear, BBC World Service, featuring singers clearly from the British Isles.