Translating the Nation: Coke Studio Pakistan’s Journey to Transnationality on YouTube

Authors

  • Salman Rafique Oklahoma State University, Stillwater
  • Komal Nazir Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54487/jcp.v9i2.7620

Abstract

This essay studies Coke Studio Pakistan’s migration from domestic television broadcasts to YouTube, and its subsequent global popularity, as a case study to highlight the commercial and technological affordances of the digital platforms like YouTube. Focusing on Coke Studio Pakistan’s official YouTube channels, I argue that the show’s transnational reach and popularity depend on a palimpsestic engagement with regional, devotional, and popular repertoires, an explicitly impure fusion aesthetic, a small‑screen‑oriented visual design, and a pronounced responsiveness to participatory metrics on YouTube. Through close analysis of key songs and seasons, the essay demonstrates how Coke Studio Pakistan simultaneously professionalizes vernacular talent and reconfigures cultural memory by foregrounding remakes of popular songs that algorithmically overshadow their hypotexts. By situating Coke Studio Pakistan alongside global music channels such as T-Series, the essay argues that YouTube’s “spreadable” logics enable new, multidirectional flows in which niche, corporate, and oppositional impulses remain in productive tension.

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Published

2026-06-29

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2026): Journal of Contemporary Poetics

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Journal of Contemporary Poetics

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This work is licensed under Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International — CC BY-NC 4.0

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