Over the past few months, English Canadian singer Feist has been wowing audiences on a tour of North America after music fans there went crazy for her second album, The Reminder. It may come as a major surprise to Feist fans – and everyone else! – to learn that the singer’s second album was, in fact, produced by a French label, Polydor-Universal. Meanwhile, audiences across Europe cannot seem to get enough of sultry-voiced Ayo, a German singer born to a Nigerian father and a Gypsy mother. Ayo’s album, Joyful (entirely sung in English) is another success story released on the same label.

Polydor-Universal now appears to have more musical surprises up its sleeve with two back-to-back releases from New Yorkers. The newly-released Seen could well be the album that brings hot young folk-pop talent Morley to mainstream attention. Meanwhile, Nobody Left To Crown (scheduled for release on 18 February), marks the recording comeback of the legendary singer, songwriter and guitarist Richie Havens – the man famous for playing solo on stage for over two hours at the start of Woodstock back in 1969! Given the current CD recession in the U.S. record industry, four or five times less artists are being signed State-side and American singers and musicians are increasingly beginning to think about going into artistic exile – if not physically, then at least in terms of recording contracts!

Richie Havens, grinning the wry old grin of a man who has seen it all, points out that "Twenty years ago, I already made a foray into Europe actually, recording an album with an Italian label." Back in the ‘80s, no major record company in the U.S. in their right mind would have bet a cent on the viability of Havens making a comeback. In their eyes, the legendary hippie, old friend of Bob Dylan’s and sole surviving representative of the ‘50s folk scene in New York was a has-been. But France has now welcomed Havens with open arms. Look back a few decades in music history and you’ll find France already assuming the role of ‘terre d’accueil’, welcoming the provocative black American singer Josephine Baker and the Argentine tango orchestras who would later set off from Paris by train to take the rest of Europe by storm.

Post World War II, the French were not just busy swinging to Glenn Miller’s In the Mood and acquiring a taste for Coca-Cola. France proved to be ahead of the times, greeting black American musicians with open arms and treating them in a way they could never have imagined back home. Miles Davis always claimed that he resorted to heroin when he returned from his first trip to France. In Paris, he had enjoyed a brief but passionate love affair with beautiful Left Bank muse, Juliette Gréco, hung out at cafés with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and shaken Picasso’s hand. Back in the U.S., he was thrown back into the harsh daily reality of racism. Meanwhile, many of Davis’s fellow black American musicians such as Sidney Bechet and Don Byas left America to live in France and the bluesman Memphis Slim even opened his own club in Paris. Years later, the American ex-pats were followed by an influx of musicians from the former colonies as Paris became home to the likes of Manu Dibango and Francis Bebey (from Cameroon), Pierre Akendengué (from Gabon) and to a host of South American musicians fleeing dictatorships in their homeland (such as the Chilean group Quilapayun and the Argentine group Cuarteto Cedron).

With the advent of ‘world music’ in the ‘80s, French record companies reinforced their ties with artists from developing countries as world sounds extended their reign well into the ‘90s. Specialist labels and major record companies sent talent scouts out around the globe in search of new music trends and new acts to sign. The U.K. and the U.S. also woke up to the huge music potential of Africa and South America. The Senegalese star Youssou N’Dour was signed to a label in the U.S., Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan recorded for Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld label in the U.K. and Ali Farka Touré and Buena Vista Social Club landed contracts with the London-based label World Circuit. But with CD sales plummeting rapidly in the early 2000s, legal ties between artists from the South and record labels in the North began to break down.

The global music market is shifting again now and France’s ‘tricolore’ flags are popping up everywhere. Take hot young up-and-coming Portuguese fado talent Cristina Branco, for instance. Cristina is currently signed to the French label, Universal, and records at home in Portugal but, ironically, the market where her fado records are selling best right now is Holland. Meanwhile, despite lucrative offers from Anglo-Saxon labels, the Cape Verdean diva Cesaria Evora has remained loyal to her Parisian pied-à-terre and her French label Sony-BMG. In a weirder example of a non-French success story, there is Calvin Russell a singer who, eighteen years after his debut album released in Paris, is still signed to a French label. An American singer singing in American English about Americans’ America, but his records have never managed to rack up export sales on the U.S. market. Now, however, with the advent of new acts such as Feist, Ayo and Morley, non-French artists bearing the "made in France" label are competing with Anglo-saxon artists on their own territory.

One of the reasons for this current success story is that the French market benefits from buoyant homegrown sales, "local" productions accounting for two thirds of overall record sales in France. This means that Paris subsidiaries of major labels have acquired unexpected autonomy when it comes to decision-making and signing new acts. Even with the current shaky economic climate, these Paris subsidiaries still have a significant budget to invest in artists with international potential. For once, France’s famous "cultural exception" seems to be working in favour of globalization!