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In my experience, independent bands starting small tend to flock to English everywhere too, without many prospects. Most then understandably stay small. "When

• mafribe 11y ago
  There are plenty of independent bands singing in local languages. Few of them make it global. More imporant, humans are herd animals and often (not always) emulate others, especially others that have had success. If you've grown up in an environment saturated with English-language pop-music, like a lot of the world has, then the idea to sing in your native language might seem absurd or a fool's errand. You need to think historically. The dominance of English language pop music emerged at a time when music was distributed as vinyl records. They were very expensive to produce and distribute. Basically, to recoup the cost of producing and distributing vinyl, you had to sell an extremely large number (millions) of identical products, so you can industrialse the process. You target the most lucrative market (US), carter mercilessly to that market's demands, and homogenise (by way marketing in all forms) as much as possible the consumers, so you can sell as many copies of as few products as possible. You amplify this process by reusing production, distribution, marketing and reselling the product in less lucrative markets. While the economics of producing and distributing has changed, the change was too recent to have affected the dominance of English in this field, a dominance that was a reaction to the market forces described. Social evolution typically trails technical evolution.