Ukrainian music abroad

Of the cultural exports, music is the one that moves most easily. It requires no translation, it fits in a suitcase, and streaming means the distribution problem is already solved.

What is actually travelling

Contemporary popular music, touring an international festival and club circuit that has become substantially more open to artists from the region.

The folk-electronic fusion strand, which takes traditional polyphonic singing and archive material and sets it in contemporary production. This has been unusually successful abroad because it sounds like nothing else and because the underlying material is genuinely striking.

Classical performers and composers, working in orchestras and opera houses internationally, and Ukrainian repertoire increasingly programmed by ensembles who had not previously played it.

And traditional ensembles performing archive repertoire, playing to audiences who had no prior exposure to it.

Why it matters commercially

Touring revenue, streaming royalties, publishing rights and festival fees are real money earned abroad and remitted.

More significantly, music is how a great many people form an impression of a country. A person who has never read anything about Ukraine may nonetheless have heard something from it, and that is a form of reach no ministry can purchase.

The archive connection

A significant proportion of the folk-derived work is built directly on the field recordings discussed elsewhere. The collectors who went into villages with a phonograph a century ago are, unexpectedly, part of a current export industry.

Music travelling faster than other cultural products is because it needs no customs and no logistics — the exact opposite of my own business, which is why it interests me. The commercial note is this: somebody who first hears of a country through its music later looks at its products. Recognition runs ahead of exports.