Chart Wars

America is the most culturally powerful country in the world. It's not up for discussion, it's fact. Americans have popularised fast food, shopping centres, 'scripted reality' TV shows, 24-hour news channels, production line manufacture, jeans, consumer culture- pretty much every aspect of every person's life around the world has been touched in some way by the United States. Even language has been affected: students learning English as a foreign language aren't learning British English- rather, the American alternative. But nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than in the music industry.

Take a look at your music collection. How many of those artists are British? How many are American? Unless you are a massive musical Anglophile, chances are the latter outweighs the former by a significant amount. Now go into your local music shop, peruse the aisles, and compare the number of US artists to those from Britain, or any other country for that matter. See, it's not just you- the rest of the world is the same. No matter which country you're in, you're much more likely to hear Justin Timberlake or Green Day on the radio than you are Arctic Monkeys or Robbie Williams. And even when you do hear a British artist or band, chances are their style has been substantially informed by American culture, an effect most evident in the way nearly every mainstream British music act sings with an American accent.

Undertake a survey of the most recent song charts in both America and Britain and you'll find, unsurprisingly, that both favour artists from their respective countries. That's fair enough, you wouldn't expect anything different. What is different was the extent to which each chart contains songs from the other side of the Atlantic. In the British Top 10 for this week, there was a 50/50 split between British and 'foreign' entries, with American songs taking three of the five non-British places. It's all pretty equal. But then we have the top 10 American tracks, of which only three were performed by non-Americans- and only one of those three was by a Brit. It is clearly much harder for a British act to break into the American market than it is for the opposite to occur. Here, we are saturated in Pitbulls and Taylor Swifts and Rihannas, but across the pond only really big names like Ed Sheeran, Adele or One Direction can stand a chance of making even a dent in the charts- although, let's be honest, that last example's success is mainly down to American girls' apparent obsession with English accents and fringes.

Of course, you could argue that it's only logical that a bigger country would have more success stories than a country forty times smaller with a fifth of the population. In those many extra millions, there must be hundreds more people with the musical ability to make it in the industry. But I don't think that's the whole story. To me, there is one main factor that has facilitated American artists' success in Britain, and hindered Brits' attempts in the States, and it is this: America is in. It always has been in. Americans have been dictating pop culture since pop culture became a thing. That is why every Michael Jackson single, every Beyonce album, every dribbly noise Justin Bieber gurgles into a microphone, has received massive coverage in the UK- and, indeed, across the world. The problem is that America is also in in America. And whereas we have British acts to try and balance out the influx from the States, all America has is more Americans. They end up so saturated in themselves that there's hardly any room for anyone from anywhere else to break in.

It's not a massive problem- a lot of the American artists and bands that get exported over to Britain are very good indeed, and we can just dismiss the ones we don't like so much. I'm sure Americans are perfectly happy with the mix of music they receive as well, and thanks to the internet both sides can discover more of the other's talents than ever before. It's just that there's such a massive imbalance and, with everything America has given us culturally, it would be nice to be able to give more back every once in a while.