ABSTRACT
Transnational music corporations are increasingly owned by an alliance of Japanese, European and US-American interests, but it is becoming more and more difficult to locate the source of 'their' culture. The problem is that local music needs a minimum of infrastructure to be able to develop sufficiently to reach the global market. At the moment this should be the task of national music politics. 'Domesticness' will always be an ideological category, with no empirical backbone but the people who believe that a piece of music is domestic. What is 'domestic' for one group is 'foreign' for other groups. Whether such policy measures are aimed at the safeguarding of authentic indigenous musics or the strengthening of the infrastructures of a local musical life, they are confronted with one crucial problem: the definition of what is to be understood by 'local', 'domestic', 'national' and 'indigenous'.
