The Structure of the Mainstream Music in Slovenia: Global Hits and Local Sediments

Abstract This article presents the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the mainstream music in Slovenia, a small and peripheral music market shaped by global trends and regional pop-cultural history. Drawing on survey data on musical preferences (2021) and radio airplays from 2017 to 2022, the study combines big data methodologies with a reflexive theoretical approach about mainstream music as a meta-genre. The findings expose the relational structure of audience taste, revealing genre clusters that reflect cultural divides between global and local, and a dual mainstream formation in the radio’s airplay: one driven by seasonal, high-rotation global hits, and another composed of canonized domestic and regional evergreens. This layered formation illustrates how institutional repetition and audience selection reproduce the status quo in contemporary cultural industries, while constraining aesthetic innovation, marginalizing younger local artists, and reinforcing generational divides within the Slovenian music landscape.