197 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 N. Kawashima, H.-K. Lee (eds.), Asian Cultural Flows, Creative Economy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0147-5_12 Chapter 12 The Diffusion of Music Via YouTube: Comparing Asian and European Music Video Charts Just Kist and Marc Verboord Abstract This research aims to study what role YouTube – arguably the largest and most popular video sharing website in the world – plays in the globalization of pop music. As a transnational medium, the internet has the potential to diminish the impact of cultural centrality and cultural proximity in explaining cultural fows. We conducted an empirical analysis of YouTube’s music video charts. In particular, we focused on the transnational music fows between Europe and Asia, with special attention paid to the positions of Japan and South Korea. The former is the second largest music market in the world, while the latter is increasingly associated with successfully exporting its local pop music (K-pop) in the digital era. The results show that the internet has closed the gap between cultures from different parts of the world to only a limited extent. At the same time, we found that artists from South Korea had the strongest presence in the South-East Asian charts, with greater cultural centrality than the US and Japan. The implications of these fndings are discussed below. Keywords YouTube · Cultural globalization · Cultural fows · Pop music · K-pop 1 Introduction In the summer of 2012, the music video Gangnam Style by PSY (Park Jae-Sang) went viral on the internet, becoming the most viewed video of all-time on YouTube (at the time of writing, 2.5 billion views; see also Xu et al. 2014). Gangnam Style’s success signifes that cultural products like popular music can nowadays come from anywhere in the world, and points to the role that new media, in particular YouTube, play in disseminating music across the globe (Oh and Park 2012). Although the notion that the exchange of music and other forms of culture between countries has J. Kist · M. Verboord (*) Department of Media & Communication, M8-05, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: verboord@eshcc.eur.nl