Korean chart songs from the 1960s through the 1980s are classified by Billboard-trained audio models as four to five years older than their chart date, with the gap halving after the 1990s.
Measuring Cross-Cultural Style Diffusion Through Era Classification: US and Korean Popular Music
1 Pith paper cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
1
Pith paper citing it
abstract
Popular music circulates globally while being locally reinterpreted, yet this process of cross-cultural style diffusion has rarely been quantified. We propose an era-classification framework for measuring temporal alignment between chart cultures. CNN classifiers trained from scratch on Billboard Hot 100 audio are applied to Korean Melon chart songs. Korean chart songs from the 1960s through the 1980s are consistently inferred as belonging to earlier Billboard eras, by a median of about four to five years, while the same models remain unbiased on held-out Billboard audio. The offset then halves at the 1990s, to roughly two to three years, and holds there through the 2000s. Reverse inference shows a complementary narrowing, and the pattern holds across architectures and seeds. We interpret these results as reflecting how globally circulating pop styles were locally adopted and progressively synchronized. The framework can be applied to other pairs of chart cultures beyond the US-Korea case examined here.
fields
cs.SD 1years
2026 1verdicts
CONDITIONAL 1representative citing papers
citing papers explorer
-
Measuring Cross-Cultural Style Diffusion Through Era Classification: US and Korean Popular Music
Korean chart songs from the 1960s through the 1980s are classified by Billboard-trained audio models as four to five years older than their chart date, with the gap halving after the 1990s.