I thought about this lot(your original post). This is a faulty way of looking at culture. I used to wonder why American culture(and its not 'European culture', I will explain that in a min) runs far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of culture.

Eventually the conclusion I arrived to was simple. American culture is technically what the world embraces when there are no hangups of a society. When you look at American fashion in 1990s, they are significantly different from what they wore in 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, ... so on. So much that you can identify it based on images.

When you look at Indian fashion in 1990s, is no different from 1980s, 1970s, 1960s. This is a pic from 19th century, other than the quality of the photo itself, it could have been from last year.

Why is that the case? Because these cultures put a huge weight upon tradition and hold on to their 'culture'.

American culture is what you get when a society keeps moving without any cultural hangups.

European culture runs a close second to American culture, but it does not leads. And of course before America became the leader of the world, it was Europe which did these things which currently I am attributing American culture.

Rock/Metal music was born in America, but is copied all over the world, mostly because their own music does not express anguish as well as this does. There are French, Russian, German, Paki rappers for the same reason.

Of course there are things which are not produced by American culture, for instance good clothes for really warm weather, so warmer countries will have to come up with their own cultural innovation for that. /u/Classical_Liberale keeps claiming all these things to Indian culture, when they only exist because Americans didn't really need them.

I would disagree with one thing though. Look at this image:

http://therobinreport.com/wp-content/images/istock_000015750292small-600x399.jpg

This is somewhat similar to how Indian youth would have been living and wearing(note: they are wearing mostly western clothes and carrying 'western' devices) had India been as free as America. The point being, American culture isn't really 'european' or white culture, rather its the 'culture of the free people'. This is what you get when people freely go in the direction they wanna go.