Globalization and the music industry in the 1990s

This article is an investigation on the impact of the globalization on the world musical production. Special attention is devoted to the Brazilian musical scene during the 1990s. We argue tha, paradoxically, the so-called globalization of music did not entail a larger democratization of the access to the "sounds of the world", as one would probably expect. Quite the contrar, the global recording industryhas increasingly adopted strategies, on both production and selling levels, that turn out to contribute a great deal to the regression of hearing as well as to the administration of culture.