60 THIS IS A PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT OF: The French music industry: structures, challenges and responses Hugh Dauncey (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) Other chapters in this book touch on some of the economic and financial aspects of (popular) music in France. Here, we look at some of the structures of the 'music industry' and at some of the challenges it is facing. The French music industry finds itself - in many ways - at the crossroads of most of the issues discussed in this survey of French (popular) music. It is the background to the development of chanson since the 1940s and throughout the 1950s and 1960s when Brel, Brassens and Ferré were in their heyday of political engagement and when Demy's musicals were interpreting France's relationship with the American 'other' in terms of musical and cinematographic forms and styles. Since the 1970s, it has accompanied -symbiotically - the development of other contemporary popular musics (musiques actuelles), and has increasingly been the site of struggles between France and the US in the commercial sphere as well as the cultural sphere, as multinational record companies have threatened France's perceptions of her own cultural-industrial sovereignty and as new imported forms of musical expression such as rap, house and trance have negotiated their acceptance into the mainstream of French musical culture. France's particular form of capitalism - described as an économie mixte (mixed economy) in which the private sector has always lived with a strong and often economically (as well as culturally) interventionist state has meant that the music industry in France is not just another variant of the Western free-market culture business. The music industry in France - as with almost everything else - has been