POPULAR MUSIC AS A CULTURAL SOFT POWER

Globalization has intensified contact among the large cultural groups defined by Toynbee or Huntington. This research measures through the consumption of popular music the asymmetries generated by cultural "soft power". A soft power capable of promoting lifestyles or socializing in different hierarchies of values. The methodology used has been the content analysis and its subsequent multivariate statistical treatment. Using the Spotify platform, 177011 songs are analysed by controlling the language, presence in the charts of greater successes, as well as the relationship between supply and demand, measured by the number of reproductions. The English language is hegemonic in most societies of Western culture, identifying European language clusters of a historical nature. Latin America shows a significant cultural differentiation attenuated according to its proximity to the United States of America, finally debating how musical styles are the formalized support of cultural diffusion and soft power.