Tame Impala as a case study in Glocalization

I am a really big fan of indie rock for a variety of reasons.  The concept of an independent label appeals to my sensibilities with regard to large monolithic corporations, I am really not a fan, and the artistic freedom that one is afforded by being an indie act is really quite amazing.  You can produce real music, not something canned and designed to sell a billion copies.  I found out about Tame Impala through Sirius XMU, the Sirius Satellite indie rock channel, and the magic of the Internet.  The Internet has become a great promoter of youth culture in a way that no other medium has ever been able to facilitate.  The first generation that may have had a global "youth culture" was the one that came of age in the late sixties to early seventies.  The British invasion as a rock movement was by no means focused upon the United States and probably resonated through out much of the "free world" and became the subject of much bootleg importation into the Soviet Union.  But all of this was accomplished through the promotion of major record labels who controlled what message and media made it into the main stream.  Today in contrast, the Internet can represent a kind of meritocracy of music.  That is not to say that the "best" music makes it big (Miley Cyrus is a case in point of how a traditional record label can still hold sway) but what the Internet allows one to do is to connect listeners to music that is far outside of their typical scene.  Very few of the bands that I listen to have ever come within 100 miles of Hampton Roads.  The National played in Richmond last year but with the success of their latest album they probably will start touring on a larger venue circuit which means not in Virginia Beach or Norfolk.  Where as in earlier generations a band became popular in a local scene, say Seattle and Nirvana circa 1989, and then went big nationally, today a band can become famous internationally without ever doing much locally.  Thus music has become far more globalized than many other media.  Assuming you do not live behind the Great Firewall of China, an connection to the Internet connects one to a growing global youth culture of music.  Yet even more striking is how subdivided this culture truly is.  To quote the Canadian band Arcade Fire from their latest album The Suburbs, "The music we listen to, divides us into tribes."  So while I and a fellow twenty something in Tierra del Fuego can have identical exposure to music and similar tastes, because of the shear volume of music available to us it is unlikely we would have ever come into contact with the exact same material.  That being said, despite local differences we probably could still appreciate the same music despite being at different ends of the globe.  Ultimately, while previous generations had a kind of universal soundtrack to their youths, my generation has as many sound tracks as their are subcultures of music.  In the end, rather than uniting the world in a single global music culture, the Internet may very well save us from homogeneity and create a very diverse and colorful music market where anyone with recording equipment and an internet connection can become a star.  I think Andy Warhol would be proud.    Tame Impala - It is not meant to be