"However, it is not just ideas, representations, ideologies, and styles that are globalized: in other words, it is not just content that is globalized. The globalization of content is the obvious part of the process. It is easy to see when an element of content comes from elsewhere across the globe (cultural consumption in the first sense of the concept as discussed above). By comparison, except when there are obvious border-crossing clashes, it is strangely much harder to see when literary, artistic, and musical forms are globalized. Usually they emerge slowly, subtly and hegemonically. The literary form of the novel, for example – an extended prose fictional narrative, printed and bound, to be read privately – can now be found everywhere in the world, with its greatest moment of globalization coming in the nineteenth century. This was linked to a slow world-historical change in the dominant mode of communication as script gave way to print, and print-capitalism generalized the reach of the novel as a consumerable commodity. The same can be said for novel genres: romance, comedy, detective-fiction, magical realism, and so on. As content, magical realism, for example, was used as a means of resistance to globalization and imperialism; by contrast, as form the genre was itself part of a globalizing counter-response to realism in Latin America and Southeast Asia linked back to a magical realist visual art movement in Weimar German. More generally again, it was part of the globalized spread of a literary form called ‘the novel’. Music went through the same process, though later and more unevenly. At the level of musical form, different notation systems were slowly globalized across the world with the five-line staff system rising to partial dominance in the nineteenth century. In 1939, and then confirmed by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955, an international conference recommended a global standardization of pitch with the note A to be tuned to 440 Hz. This had parallels to the earlier process of globalizing time through agreement on the prime meridian,but it remains more contentious because of issues as basic as local histories of use and questions about what temperature at which the standard should be measured. The establishment of globalized genres of music – classical, rock-and-roll, jazz, samba, and so on – developed in the twentieth century, and music was distributed on changing media of recording that waxed and waned in their dominance. At the leading edge, commercially-produced tapes, records and compact discs as albums, gave way to self-burned CD compilations, and, most recently, to web-based music management programmes such as iTunes. Linked back to content, we are now long past the point where the simple fact of cultural influence or borrowing raises eyebrows. We are used to living in a world where ‘hip hop is mixed up with samba’, as the Los Angeles’ group the Black Eyed Peas sing in ‘Mas Que Nada’, their update of the song by Brazilian pianist Sergio Mendes. More than that, fashion in the forms of distribution has entered the global scene. Will-i-am, leader of the Black-Eyed Peas, has said that the group’s latest studio release on iTunes, The END (2009), is more a continuing ‘diary’ of music rather than an album of music. ‘There is no album any more.’ This is hyperbole for effect of course, just as it was for writers such as John Barth and Walter Benjamin in saying that ‘the novel is dead’, or Roland Barthes in analytically describing "the death of the author." The difference now is that those phrases are globally accessible at the touch of button through internet search engines such as google.com."