Related Trivia : France stands out as one of the select countries that enforce a music quota system, which appears to be among the most stringent : a minimum of four in ten songs broadcast by domestic radio stations to be in the French language [1]. (link : it is this same french music that will be further supported by the new Tax)
I quite like how France defend their culture. Some of these rules sound silly, but if they slow down the world homogenising then they aren’t without benefit.
"Protect their culture" is one of those phrases that raises alarm bells, especially when it's being used by a government. We have a 1st Amendment for a reason - because governments are not to be trusted with the decisions of what cultures to protect or not. In the specific case of France, all sorts of horrible shit was done in the name of """protecting""" their culture. There were several other languages[0] native to France that Francophones had themselves tried to wipe out[1]. French is not a language in need of protection, it is a brutal predator in and of itself. If English weren't there to keep it in check[2], it'd go eat all the rest of the languages.
Strongly agree. If people want to listen to non-French songs to the point where the government needs to legislate a minimum, who is actually benefiting?
Domestic artists whose music is otherwise insufficiently supported by the local industry and who would risk being totally crowded out in favour of blasting the new Doja Cat at the expense of ever airing anything unfamiliar.
So, while music diversity on the radio is a problem, it is not a problem unique to France or even foreign language music overall. Nor do language quotas solve it. I imagine it winds up being the same as CanCon, where it doesn't so much improve the diversity of songs on the radio as much as it gives Nickelback lots of playtime.
Language quotas are not meant to be the solution, they're meant to be part of the solution. Canada is a completely different scenario given its proximity and relationship to the US. Speaking as a former music journalist in a country with domestic music quotas of varying degrees, I can tell you these things help.
You're not looking far back enough. European anti-Americanism is a monarchist meme that jumped from ideological host to ideological host until it thoroughly infected the whole continent[0].
America won its independence primarily by playing colonial powers off one another. Britain bankrupted itself defending America from the French. When Britain tried to get America to pay for being protected, America got France to bankrupt itself protecting America from the tax bill. France then had a revolution; its medieval despots replaced with liberals and left-wingers caught in a power struggle and demanding bribes of the American diplomats[1]. The rest of Europe's power elite distrusted America, as it had apparently infected France with liberal republicanism[2], and France was busy invading the rest of Europe[3] and spreading liberalism[4] elsewhere.
Monarchism was, if not defeated, at least contained with constitutional restrictions. However, other ideologies found it useful to define themselves in opposition to America. America has always been a country of contradictions. We're the liberal democracy that had to come up with a "three fifths compromise", after all. So if you're on the right[5], America is dangerously radical. If you're on the left, America is dangerously conservative. If you're a centrist, America is dangerously fickle.
I will give the "culture protectors" one thing. America's quasi-official policy has been to make it very easy to export American culture while making it very difficult to import it. This is difficult to actually enforce, however, because we have the 1st Amendment. The US government can't just ban or put quotas on French films or music in the same way that France can. In the broadcast era of publishing, America got their way primarily through public-private partnerships. It had a movie industry that it sponsored with favorable trading relations and copyright laws, while looking the other way on monopolistic policies that would shut foreign cinema out of the market. But that's all gone now - as can be evidenced by the ridiculous amount of fandom for Japanese animation and Korean music - and doesn't excuse the far more explicit legal limitations on cultural importation that France engages in.
[0] Arguably with the exception of fascists, which fucking adored America's extreme racial segregation even while it attacked America for being liberal.
They basically killed off all the other minority languages they had in their country (like oxitan) and homogenised on standard French. Some irony in that.
When I visited Paris, the expectation to (at least try to) speak French and the national pride felt like looking at a certain version of the US from the outside.
It seems that fears of music homogenization are overblown, if you check charts on streaming services for different countries (non-english speaking) they would mostly have local music, even for the countries where there are no laws protecting local music. Many of them would have no US/UK artists in top-20 (most Latin American, East European, African countries)
In France you do (with interrogation and exclamation marks as well), but not everywhere in the world. I don't think anyone would raise an eyebrow at punctuation without the leading space in a french-speaking text.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_quota#France