<human>: The recent influence of Gangnam Style on US culture got me thinking. Why is it that the musical climate of the West is generally so tough to crack into?

I am very aware that one potential answer is "because most of the music popular in the West comes from countries speak that English." That's acceptable, but doesn't fully account for the phenomenon. France is not a largely English-speaking population, but has made many more contributions recently to pop music (see: M83, Daft Punk, Phoenix, etc.) than a country like Poland. You also have English-speaking nations like South Africa whose contributions to modern pop music are not terribly notable.

I don't want anyone to get offended by this observation - there are exceptions to every rule, and I'm sure you could find a great musical act from Poland or South Africa to use as a counterpoint. I just find it interesting that some large countries with dynamic cultures are not really making splashes in modern music. For example, in the past, Italy was the most well known for Opera, Germany for grand classical composers, etc., but you don't hear much influence from those countries on modern music anymore (at least, outside the boundaries of those countries themselves).

This is probably a bit of a scatterbrained post, so I apologize if this question comes off as ignorant or poorly worded. I'm just very keen to understand the cultural development of music and why it is so dominated in the West by what seems like just a few countries.

Could you distill the essence of the text into 1-3 sentences?
<bot>: Why is it that countries occupying the Western culture are not all equally contributive to popular modern music? English-speaking population is definitely a large factor, but still not sufficient explanation.