This article examines the role of showcase festivals and music export organisations (MEOs) in shaping international music careers amid the digital era’s paradox of access and visibility. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Europe, it explores how these institutions have become central, interdependent actors within a global music export ecosystem that promises opportunity yet often reproduces existing hierarchies. While MEOs provide support through funding, training, and networking, and showcase festivals offer exposure through curated programming, access remains uneven and shaped by structural inequalities. Despite these challenges, the ecosystem offers a relevant, if imperfect, framework for enabling mobility, professional development, and artistic circulation. Its value lies not in guaranteeing outcomes, but in offering a visible and adaptive platform through which careers can be imagined and pursued. By reassessing institutional norms and broadening support mechanisms, this evolving infrastructure holds the potential to promote more inclusive and sustainable pathways for international music development.

The transnational region of Karelia is divided between Finland and Russia, two countries that differ in myriad ways. Karelians have negotiated questions of identity and belonging throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, current events, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and increased contemporary discourses on minority identity as well as cultural appropriation, have made identity questions increasingly salient. Karelian metal music has become an important site for identity negotiations in multiple languages and with the incorporation of sources from history and folklore. This article considers four lyrical themes – belonging, history, folklore, and nature – and how these contribute to identity negotiations. Karelian lyrics are compared with the help of distant reading and thematic analysis to better understand the differences and similarities on both sides of the border. The East-West divide can be discerned from the database, with Finnish Karelian bands more likely to adapt material related to the West, whereas Russian Karelian artists more regularly invoke the East.