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Comment by CrypticShift | Hacker News Reader

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)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_quota#France

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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.

Yeah, it's hard to hate a country for attempting to protect their culture. Kudos.

"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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patois

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language#Preservation

[2] Similar to the concept of a keystone predator, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species

Funnily enough, defending the language means trying to delegitimze stuff like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/world/africa/africa-frenc...

The white French government is mad that their previous imperial subjects are now really defining what French will be into the future.

>The white French government is mad that their previous imperial subjects are now really defining what French will be into the future.

whats wrong?

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.

Your first amedment doesn't give a shit about natives also.

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.

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.

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)

Citation needed. /s

Not specific-language related, but see also Canada's CanCon legislation on Canadian-made music quotas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

Yup, 40% of radio content and 55% of TV content must be 'Canadian origin' (except the CBC which is 60%).

They just spam Bieber, Celine Dion, and Drake to make those numbers instead of sampling smaller acts.

Related trivia: In French, you put a space before a semicolon.

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.

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