Spotify has unexpectedly waded into the forthcoming European elections. The music streaming service, which has more than 200 million users – about 36% of them in Europe – has produced an EU-themed playlist entitled Get Vocal Europe!, featuring one track from each of the EU’s 28 member nations, and is sending messages to its customers encouraging them to vote in the elections, which take place on 23-26 May.

The messages – which appear on opening the Spotify app – direct users to a website called thistimeimvoting.eu, which provides information in all official EU languages on voting. A second message is planned to appear on the day the user’s country votes.

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Spotify, a Swedish company which has offices across the EU, has said the initiative is designed to try and reverse falling turnout in European elections, which reached a low of 43% in 2014. Among the artists on the playlist known to British listeners are Sweden’s Zara Larsson – represented by her recent Top 10 hit Don’t Worry About Me – the critically acclaimed Catalan pop star Rosalía and the UK’s representative Mabel.

But whether the names are recognisable or not, the striking thing about the Get Vocal Europe! playlist is how familiar virtually everything on it sounds. It is not a stretch to imagine any of its 28 tracks – almost all of them big on Auto-Tuned vocals, sounds influenced by tropical house, and beats and vocal delivery in thrall to US hip-hop – in the UK Top 10. The days are clearly long passed when pop from continental Europe meant either Abba or regrettable novelty hits – brought back from discos in Spain and Italy by holidaymakers – or when Top of the Pops would regularly dispatch presenters to Boulogne or Amsterdam to unearth an endless parade of moustachioed men attempting to mix synthesisers with accordions and oompah music.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mabel, the UK’s representative in Spotify’s EU playlist.

The listener searches in vain for something that sounds genuinely novel to British ears amid the rappers (among them Pluuto, apparently Estonia’s leading exponent of SoundCloud rap) and the post-Ed Sheeran sensitive singer-songwriters (Duncan Laurence, whose Coldplay-ish Arcade is the Netherlands’ entry in Eurovision 2019). Slovakia’s Neries and BassKid offer a slightly odd juxtaposition of doomy, echoing grunge guitars, hip-hop and a pop chorus, but only Cyprus’ Michalis Hatzigiannis sounds like Europop in the old-fashioned sense: there’s a distinct hint of accordion on To Kalokiari Mou.

Depending on your perspective, Spotify’s Get Vocal Europe! either tells you a lot about the ongoing homogenisation of pop, or about how accustomed British ears have become to hearing music with roots outside the UK or US. The latter is a process that has been going on for decades. In the 90s, the Top 40 was filled with dance music from Germany, France and beyond, and continues to be so. At the end of last year, the Top 5 played host to Dynoro and Gigi D’Agostino’s pop-house track In My Mind without anybody really noticing that it came from Lithuania and Italy: you can only begin to imagine the kind of hilarity such a combination would once have caused among Radio 1 DJs.

In the noughties, the rise of Scandinavian pop factories – begun by Sweden’s Cheiron Studios – re-enacted Abba’s dominance of the 70s charts on a scale that would have startled even Björn and Benny, shifting from cheesy Euro hits to supplying material to the biggest stars in the world. More recently, the explosion in Latin American pop that followed the global success of Luis Fonsi’s Despacito and the startling success of Korean boyband BTS has broken the language barrier.

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Spotify, along with YouTube and social media, certainly has a claim to be part of this cultural shift. Streaming playlists now challenge radio as the means by which listeners discover new music and the global Top 50 playlist is invariably on Spotify’s home page: suddenly certain tracks have a storefront previously denied them by Anglophone media. Whether listening to the Get Vocal Europe! playlist is going to encourage anyone to vote in the elections is a moot point. If nothing else, it proves one kind of European unity exists that has nothing to do with politics.