The Question

Global cultural diversity represented through music, film, and art from different regions

In 2012, a South Korean pop star named Psy released a song called "Gangnam Style." It became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views. At the time it felt like a novelty — a curious global moment quickly filed under "internet phenomenon" and forgotten. It was not a novelty. It was a signal. Thirteen years later, K-pop is a global industry worth billions. BTS sells out stadiums in Berlin and São Paulo. "Squid Game" became Netflix's most-watched series ever. "Parasite" won Best Picture at the Oscars. Nigerian Afrobeats plays in supermarkets in Manchester and Miami. Bollywood is the world's largest film industry by volume, and its reach into global streaming is growing fast.

The question this article addresses is whether this represents a genuine, durable shift in the direction of cultural influence — or whether Western culture is simply absorbing and co-opting these currents, as it has done with jazz, reggae, and hip-hop, incorporating them into its own ever-expanding repertoire. The answer matters because cultural influence is not merely aesthetic. It shapes what values, narratives, and ways of seeing the world feel natural and normal to billions of people.

What the Evidence Shows

The numbers behind non-Western cultural production have become impossible to ignore. Bollywood produces over 1,800 films per year — roughly four times Hollywood's output. The Indian film industry reached a global box office of over $2.5 billion in 2024, with significant audiences in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia that have little interest in Hollywood product. Nollywood — Nigeria's film industry — produces more titles annually than any other country and dominates the African streaming market. K-pop exports generated over $13 billion in economic value for South Korea in 2023, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency.

"The 20th century was the American century in culture as in geopolitics. The 21st century will be no one's century — which is a form of progress."

Pankaj Mishra — Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire, 2023 edition

Streaming has changed the mechanics of cultural reach in a way that fundamentally disadvantages incumbents. When distribution was controlled by Hollywood studios and their international networks, getting a non-English film in front of a global audience required navigating those gatekeepers. Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ have created a global distribution infrastructure that any sufficiently compelling content can use. "Squid Game" cost roughly $21 million to produce. Its estimated value to Netflix was over $900 million. That return on investment changes what gets made and where.

"For the first time in two centuries, the world's most watched story might not be an American one."

Why This Is Happening

The economic rise of Asia has created confident, well-funded cultural industries. South Korea's government made a deliberate decision in the late 1990s — following the Asian financial crisis — to invest in cultural exports as an economic strategy. The result, the Hallyu or Korean Wave, is now a textbook case in cultural soft power. China has made similar investments, with ambitions to project Chinese cultural values globally as a counterweight to Western influence. India's cultural industries have grown organically alongside its economy. The wealth that funds cultural production is no longer concentrated exclusively in the West.

Social media has destroyed the gatekeeping architecture of Western cultural dominance. For most of the 20th century, global cultural reach required distribution deals, radio airplay, and retail shelf space — all controlled by Western-dominated industries. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have no such barriers. A song produced in Lagos or Seoul reaches a teenager in Mexico City or Toronto on exactly the same terms as one produced in Los Angeles. The infrastructure of global cultural distribution is no longer Western property.

American soft power is actively eroding. Soft power — the ability to attract and persuade through cultural appeal rather than coercion — depends on the attractiveness of the model being presented. American culture's global appeal was, in part, an appeal to American values: freedom, opportunity, democratic pluralism. As American politics has become more polarised and globally less admired, the cultural product attached to it has become a less appealing export. Surveys of global opinion toward the United States have shown sustained decline across most regions since the early 2000s.

What Could Happen

American Culture Adapts and Absorbs Most likely

Hollywood and the US music industry do what they have always done when confronted with powerful cultural competitors: absorb, adapt, and co-opt. K-pop aesthetics inform US pop production. Streaming platforms invest in local-language content globally while distributing it through US-controlled platforms. Western culture retains structural dominance through ownership of the distribution layer, even as the content itself becomes increasingly diverse. By 2035, the most-watched content globally is more diverse in origin, but the companies profiting most from it are still largely American.

A Genuine Multipolar Cultural World Emerges Possible

By 2035, no single cultural tradition dominates global output. Korean, Nigerian, Indian, and Latin American content collectively reaches as large a global audience as American and British content combined, for the first time in the modern era. Cultural influence becomes genuinely multipolar — different regions lead in different genres and media. Hollywood remains a major force but is no longer the default reference point for global popular culture. This is our model's threshold scenario for the 48% confidence rating.

Political Decoupling Accelerates Cultural Decoupling Less likely

Geopolitical tensions between the US, China, and their respective spheres of influence produce a more rapid and more complete cultural decoupling than market forces alone would generate. China builds a self-contained cultural ecosystem that dominates its own sphere. The US restricts Chinese platforms — as it has begun to do with TikTok — and Chinese culture is largely blocked from the Western market and vice versa. The multipolar cultural world arrives faster but in the form of rival cultural blocs rather than a genuine global conversation between traditions.

Our Assessment
We put the probability at 48% — roughly even odds that non-Western cultural exports collectively outpace Western ones by 2035. This is genuinely uncertain territory — the first time we have assigned a near-coin-flip to a prediction of this kind, which itself reflects how live this question is. The forces driving non-Western cultural ascendance are real, well-funded, and structural. But Western culture has shown extraordinary resilience and adaptability over two centuries, and the companies that own the global distribution infrastructure are overwhelmingly Western. Our best read is that a multipolar cultural world is coming — but whether it arrives by 2035 or a decade later, and whether Western control of distribution blunts its impact, are questions the evidence cannot yet resolve.

What Can We Do

People from diverse backgrounds enjoying global cultural content together

A more multipolar cultural world is, on balance, a good thing. Here is how to engage with it well.

Seek out non-Western content actively, not just when an algorithm serves it to you. The algorithmic recommendation systems of streaming platforms are trained on existing viewing behaviour, which skews heavily Western. If you only watch what you are recommended, you will watch mostly what people like you have already watched. The richest cultural experiences of the next decade will require active discovery: seeking out Korean cinema, Nigerian literature, Indian classical music, Brazilian architecture on purpose.

Be sceptical of the cultural absorption pattern. When Western pop stars incorporate Afrobeats rhythms, or when Hollywood remakes a Korean thriller, ask who is being paid and credited. Cultural exchange is genuinely valuable. Cultural extraction — taking aesthetic innovations from non-Western traditions without attribution or compensation — is something different. The distinction matters and is worth making.

For people working in creative industries, the multipolar cultural moment represents a genuine opportunity. Audiences are more open to unfamiliar cultural products than at any previous point in history. Stories, aesthetics, and musical traditions that would have been dismissed as too niche for global audiences a decade ago are finding enormous global followings. The market for cultural diversity has never been larger.

For governments and cultural policymakers, the Korean model is instructive. South Korea's deliberate investment in cultural industries as economic infrastructure produced returns that dwarfed the initial outlay many times over. Countries with rich cultural traditions and limited resources to promote them globally should study that model carefully. The infrastructure for global cultural distribution exists and is accessible. What is required is the will to use it.

Sources
  • Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) — Content Industry Statistics, 2024
  • Motion Picture Association — THEME Report: Global Theatrical & Home Entertainment, 2024
  • Pew Research Center — Global Attitudes Survey: Views of the United States, 2024
  • UNESCO — Re-Shaping Cultural Policies: Advancing Creativity for Development, 2022
  • Netflix Investor Relations — Q4 2024 Letter to Shareholders
  • Forecast The World Research Desk — 800+ data sources