The Making of a Modern Music Industry

In the early 1950s, Pierre Delanoë, a civil servant, began writing songs with Gilbert Bécaud in his spare time. Indirectly, this was to lead to Delanoë’s becoming a founder member of the radio station Europe 1 and eventually the administrator of the performing rights organisation, the SACEM. Looking back in the 1990s on the start of this second career, he observes that the music business he encountered then was much as it had been a century before when the SACEM had been created in 1851. Born in 1918, he remembers that street singers were still common in his childhood, particularly in the Montmartre area between Barbès and Clichy, at funfairs, and even in blocks of flats, where a singer would pass from one courtyard to another and coins would be thrown down wrapped in paper by appreciative tenants. On street corners, sheet music specially annotated for singing (known as ‘petits formats’ since the nineteenth century) would be sold so the crowd could join in. Although by the start of the 1950s the street singers had mostly disappeared, sheet music was still the core of the music economy, more so than the 78 rpm, which was expensive and fragile. The first song Delanoë wrote with Bécaud, ‘Mes mains’ (My Hands), was premiered by a pre-war singer, Lucienne Boyer, at her farewell concert. The public instantly began buying the sheet music, published by Beuscher, and a million copies were sold. In the offices of the big music publishers like Beuscher – or Salabert, Semi, Raoul Breton – a fledgling lyricist could pair up with a fledgling composer and meet established stars like Piaf, Luis Mariano, Georges Guétary or Yves Montand on the look-out for new material. They could have a song accepted for publication, sign a contract and receive an advance of perhaps 10,000 old francs while the firm tried to place their work. A music publisher could also help launch the careers of new artists, as had been the case with Trenet and Charles Aznavour, who were both indebted to Raoul Breton for their success. Aznavour would eventually buy the company to prevent it falling into foreign hands. In the early 1950s, then, the publishing house was a place of encounter, exchange and transaction, one of the key sites in which popular musical culture functioned. Soon, however, all of this was swept away. ‘Mes mains’ proved tobe Delanoë’s last big selling petit format, as the old publishing houses closed or were bought out, so that by the mid-1990s, only Beuscher and Raoul Breton remained fully French. The French music industry was in fact transformed from the late 1950s by the steady adoption of American commercial practices, at the root of which was vinyl.

Music Hits before 1958

The history of popular music in France since 1958 is inseparable from the histories of youth culture and the cultural industries. All three raise issues about French conceptions of art and culture, behind which lies a further connoted issue: authenticity. This is a slippery term whose meaning is constantly renegotiated and therefore, to borrow the word Richard Peterson uses in the context of country music, ‘fabricated’. That is, as Peterson puts it, ‘authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct’. Nevertheless, authenticity is also, as Roy Shuker notes, a ‘central concept in the discourses surrounding popular music, with considerable symbolic value’. And this, in my view, is particularly true of France. In what Shuker calls ‘its common-sense usage’, authenticity in popular music (and in pop particularly) means artistic integrity. It ‘assumes that the producers of music texts undertook the “creative” work themselves; that there is an element of originality or creativity present, along with connotations of seriousness, sincerity, and uniqueness’. Beyond this, Shuker goes on, authenticity is defined by a series of dichotomies: ‘creativity’ or ‘self-expression’ is supposedly more authentic than manufactured commercialism; the independent sector is more authentic than the majors; live performance more authentic than recorded, and so on. Further binaries are added if one looks at the uses to which popular music is put in specific communities or subcultures. Here, for example, community music is more authentic than globalised, mass music. In all of these dichotomies, there is an assumption that, as Shuker puts it, ‘commerce dilutes, frustrates, and negates artistic aspects of the music’.1 This assumption may be unexamined and questionable, but it is none the less fundamental to the culture and ideology of contemporary popular music. This is particularly true of French popular music, as I shall attempt to show, though here the assumption is overlaid with another, which is that authenticity also has to do with popular music’s organic, historic connection with a people. In this additional sense, which one might describe as national authenticity, a music is genuinely ‘popular’ when it is born of, ‘natural’ to and expressive of a national community. Over the last half-century, the French cultural establishment has experienced considerable difficulty tolerating the industrialisation, commodification and globalisation of the arts in general and of music in particular, processes which pop is assumed to have introduced into France from abroad, or at the very least exacerbated. Artists, intellectuals and culture workers have often adopted an Adornian pessimism in this regard and in recent years have mounted a resistance in the name of a ‘French cultural exception’, to which the notion of national authenticity is, I suggest, fundamental.