Music has long been a vital aspect of popular culture all across the world. Even before globalization began to intertwine world cultures, musical communities existed throughout the globe. As globalization did begin to expand, musical interconnectedness came on slowly. Radio and television shows linked east and west, but not in an explicitly direct fashion. Yet upon the advent of the internet, music really began to cross worldly lines and mix between all cultures. In the words of anthropologist Daya Kishan Thussu, “The global media landscape in the first decade of the twenty-first century represents a complex terrain of multi-vocal, multimedia, and multi-directional flows,” (Mapping Global Media Flow and Contra-Flow, found in The Globalization Reader, Fourth Edition, ed. Frank J. Lechner and John Boli). Due to the connectivity of the Internet, media has been able to flow in myriad directions to unlimited locations around the world. On no site is this more evident than on BeatMyDay.com, an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) blog.
Though the Internet is overrun with music blogs and inundated with those bloggers opinions, BeatMyDay is uniquely global in its operations. Founded by a blogger named Anton in May 2010 in Goteborg, Sweden, BeatMyDay is now one of the most popular music blogs online. However, what makes BeatMyDay so unique is that despite its Swedish roots, the writers all write in English. Featured music comes from sources across the globe, often highlighting artists outside of the European and American spectrum. Though begun as a hobby, Anton has expanded his writer team outside of Swedish borders and now updates the blog all the time–claiming, in an interview with Mixify.com, one day off since BeatMyDay’s launch on May 24th, 2010. Certainly, BeatMyDay benefits from EDM’s global nature and the high percentage of Swedes that speak English. Yet this type of community could not exist without the Internet. First of all, Anton was provided with a forum on which he could post his musical insights. In addition, he could find other writers based on the facility of online connection. Yet most importantly, he was and is not limited by traditional geography; the Internet allows him and his team to pluck music from all around the world and broadcast those blog posts right back to the global sphere. As previously stated, music has always been an integral aspect in global popular culture. But the Internet has driven the movement to make that music globalized, allowing sites like BeatMyDay to thrive outside of traditional geographical bounds.