A Ukrainian song crosses Europe on one televised night and stops at the American border because the two markets are won by different machines. Europe converts a broadcast moment into streams within days, and streams are what its charts count. The United States is entered through radio formats and through publishing administration, and neither of those moves because a song did well on television in May. I composed and produced "Stefania" for Kalush Orchestra, which won the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest with 631 points, and the gap between what happened in Europe and what happened in America was visible within a fortnight.
What did the chart record actually look like?
Wide across Europe, narrow and specialised in the United States.
"Stefania" took 631 points in Turin, including 439 from the public vote, and reached number one on Ukraine Airplay and number one in Lithuania. It entered the UK Singles Chart on 26 May 2022, peaked at 38 and stayed two weeks. It was certified platinum in Poland. In the United States it reached number 2 on World Digital Song Sales and 85 on the Billboard Global 200, and that pairing is the whole story in two lines. World Digital Song Sales is a chart built to hold records that are selling to a real audience which the mainstream charts are not set up to see.
"Teresa & Maria", which I composed for Ukraine's 2024 entry, finished third with 453 points and repeated the pattern with different numbers: number one on Ukraine Airplay, 2 in Lithuania, 3 on Latvia Streaming, gold in Poland and gold in Greece, and 130 on Billboard Global Excluding US. Over 944 million video views, and no American chart position outside the global rankings.
Why does a European result barely register on an American chart?
Because the volume arrives in the wrong places, and the charts are built to notice that.
Billboard runs two worldwide charts rather than one, a Global 200 that includes United States data and a Global Excluding US that removes it. The pair exists by design, because American consumption is large enough and weighted differently enough that a single worldwide ranking would say less about the world than about one country in it. A record that peaks at 85 on the first while topping two national airplay charts is telling you precisely where its listeners live.
The practical consequence for anyone planning a release: a European result is not momentum that carries. It is a completed event in one set of territories. Nothing in it obliges an American programmer, editor or supervisor to act.
What does American radio actually require?
A format that will accept the record, and a campaign that asks stations to add it.
Reportable airplay in the United States is measured through format panels, and a song enters through the format that fits it. Spanish-language music has its own panels and its own charts, which is why a Spanish record can build a national story without ever touching pop radio. Ukrainian-language music has no panel. That leaves one route, an add at mainstream Top 40, which is a promotion campaign with a budget and a staff behind it. A foreign independent release, however well it performed on television, arrives without either.
This is where most conversations about breaking a market go wrong. The obstacle is not taste and it is not quality of the record. It is that no mechanism exists for the record to be considered.
Which languages have crossed, and what did they have?
Very few, and the ones that did arrived with an industry attached.
Fewer than forty non-English-language songs have ever reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 across the chart's history, a clear majority of them in Spanish, with Korean a distant second and everything else in single figures. Neither Spanish nor Korean crossed on the strength of a single moment. Spanish-language music has decades of United States infrastructure, including labels with American offices, dedicated radio and a domestic audience of tens of millions. Korean music arrived with label promotion departments operating inside the country and a coordinated release calendar.
The lesson is unglamorous. Language is a filter, but the thing that actually gets crossed is an organisational threshold, not a linguistic one.
What is the part almost nobody mentions?
Registration. A song that is not findable as a work is not licensable at speed, and speed is the whole business.
The four major American performing rights organisations publish a shared database, Songview, which ASCAP and BMI launched on 21 December 2020 with more than 25 million works, and which was expanded in September 2025 to cover over 38 million works from all four. It is free and public. It is also the first place an American licensee looks. A Ukrainian composition that was registered only at home does not appear there, and the search returns nothing.
Two identifiers get confused here and the difference matters. An ISRC identifies a recording, and a distributor issues one automatically for every release, so Ukrainian releases almost always have them. An ISWC identifies the underlying composition, and it comes from registration with a rights society. Plenty of internationally streamed Ukrainian songs have ISRCs on every version and no ISWC anywhere, which means the recording is identifiable and the song is not.
Where is the export route that actually works?
Picture, and it works for a structural reason rather than a fashionable one.
A music supervisor does not need a format, a panel or a promotion budget. They need a file that can be cleared and an owner who can be found. That is a much lower barrier than radio, and it is the only route into the American market where a record with unusual instrumentation is an advantage rather than a problem to be smoothed out.
The underlying economics support this. IFPI reported global recorded music revenues of 31.7 billion dollars in 2025, up 6.4 percent, with paid subscription streaming at 52.4 percent of the total and streaming overall at 69.6 percent. Distribution has no border. Discovery still does, because editorial playlists are programmed by territory. Sync is the one channel where a decision is made by a person looking for a specific sound rather than by a system asking which market a record belongs to.
What can a producer actually control?
The parts that are decided in the session, before anyone knows whether the record will travel.
Make the instrumental and the television mix at the time of the mix rather than two years later, when the session has been moved between three machines and two of the plugin versions no longer open. Keep stems at the session sample rate, grouped the way the arrangement works rather than the way the mixer's window happened to be sorted. Use one Latin transliteration of every name across every release, because two spellings produce two entities in every credits database and the catalogue splits in half. Issue a separate ISRC for each version, including the radio edit and the instrumental. And register the composition, with the splits agreed in writing, before the release rather than after a licensee has already moved on.
None of that guarantees anything. All of it is the difference between being unavailable and being available, and unavailable is the more common failure by a wide margin.
Frequently asked
Would an English-language version fix it? It removes one obstacle and leaves the other two. Language decides whether a format can play a record, promotion decides whether it does, and registration decides whether anyone can license it.
Does a strong European chart run help a later US release? With the people who read charts, which means supervisors, agents and A&R rather than radio programmers. Treat it as a credential you cite, not as momentum you carry.
What should be done first if the goal is the United States? Register the composition with an American performing rights organisation and confirm it appears in a public search. Everything downstream assumes a licensee can find an owner in under a minute.
If you have a record you want to travel
Send me the session and tell me which territories matter, and the answer will usually be about deliverables and registration rather than about the mix. Full credit list at /credits, background and contact at /about.