French Radio London debuts in metro & via Internet
A BBC article titled
Can we learn to love French pop music? covers the debut today of French Radio London, the capital's first Gallic music station. The station
writes about itself as follows::<blockquote>
For most of the past 50 years, French music has not been cool... And yet... the last 15 years has seen the emergence of cool Gallic acts like Daft Punk, Air and Phoenix... For more than a decade France has imposed quotas of about 40% French language songs on radio... [But at the new London station] 80% of the station's music will be by French artists or in their native tongue.</blockquote>Among comments posted under the article are the following two.
Ian Oliver, via Facebook, writes:
Its no better nor worse than English language pop music... Myléne Farmer sounds like a cross between The Cure and Madonna with her head in a bucket. And brought Alizee (see below) into the pop world.
Al, London writes:
I think the main difference between French and British music is, in general, that French music has much more emphasis on the lyrics whereas British music is more music oriented. This gives the French music an inherent disadvantage in a non-Francophone world...
The station's Website can switch between French and English text. Find the English home page
here. It writes this about itself:
<blockquote>
For London's 400,000 native French speakers and the countless Francophiles, French Radio London (FRL) is the first French language terrestrial broadcast station... [and] has the best coverage of any of the three London multiplexes, reaching approximately 11 million people.</blockquote> and offers an explanation of its programming philosophy on the same page. Find its daily schedule
here.
Should you want to absolutely forbid the station from playing Alizée songs, you can send them
Webmail. They
write that
You will soon be able to download tracks you heard on FRL through iTtunes and Amazon. If your return e-mail address is something like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo, rather than
me@NonBritishTelecom.com they would not immediately surmise whether or not you live in metro London.
In any case, they are happy to stream a reliable signal to North America. Find the link to start it up on their home
page.
The advent of this happy development merits inclusion of an old France Gall song via the video below. Enjoy!
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