Even then it is not guaranteed.
In many ways it is no improvement on the whole range of awful talent shows that seem to dominate German television output these days. One wonders whether anyone can write music in German these days, let alone sing using the language.
It was not always so. Way back when in the Eurovision Song Contest people sang in their own languages, some great songs emerged. I realise that it is 48 years ago, but my favourite example of this was the Italian winner in 1964 "Non ho l'età" sung by Gigliola Cinquetti. 16 years old at the time with a song that still sends shivers up my spine and some wonderful antiquated lyrics about a girl of her age being too young to date and have a love affair. Those were the days (a survey in recent years indicated that 40% of kids in the UK and 25% in Germany were sexually active before their 16th birthdays!).
Anyway at least two live (at the time - i.e. in 1964) performances are available on YouTube. For an old man like myself it is wonderful to be able to go and revisit things like that. There are, for example, also a lot of old recordings of Jacques Brel, taken from television productions in the 1960s. Brel, as you may realise, remains one of my premier influences.
The irritations that you get with YouTube here though take some believing. If you have not got the appropriate licence the recording cannot appear on the Internet. If it were recent stuff that all the kids want to hear, I could understand - that is the way companies and artists make a living - selling their music.
A lot of the stuff which is banned from use for copyright reasons, though, is often old and even relatively obscure. There does not seem to be any consistency in this either. Choose to find Lotte Lenya singing "Mackie Messer" from Brecht's "Dreigroschenoper", sorry not allowed. But if you want to watch the entire 1931 movie containing this clip. Fine!
There are ways around this, when they work, incidentally - on Mozilla, not on Explorer.
That people might be suffering a financial loss from these free downloads is not always true, though. They can serve as samplers for new business. In my attempts to find interesting European music in languages other than English, I have found a whole range of new artists or new material from artists whom I vaguely knew.
Taking Italy as an example, I had heard some material from Gianna Nannini in the past, knew the name, Laura Pausini, but had not heard any of her material, and the names Giorgia and Elisa were unknown to me. No more. Thanks to YouTube I know far more about them and their material.
There was a concert held in 2009 at the San Siro football stadium in Milan called "Amiche per l'Abruzzo" - many leading Italian female artists performed in a charity event for the victims of the earthquake in the Abruzzo area that year. Suitably impressed I tried to purchase the DVD of the event (even given my shortage of money usw). Not available on Amazon.de and as I do not have an international credit card, it has to be purchased in Germany, but I am still looking.
I also discovered the wonderful Dutch chansonnière, Wende Snijders, through YouTube. A previously unknown name to me whose material (on CD, DVD) will be of interest if my finances ever improve.
Like this YouTube creates business. Strict imposition of copyright rules may actually be bad for business. It is certainly an area that needs closer examination and a more imaginative approach - the current system only blocks out access to material about which you would have known nothing anyway!
Postscript (December 10, 2021) - I did eventually buy the "Amiche per l'Abruzzo" DVD on Amazon. It cost somewhere in the region of 79 Euro, which was very expensive by my standards, but the whole concert was very enjoyable, showcasing a whole range of Italian female singing talent from different periods dating back to 1980 and maybe previously). If these snippets had never appeared on YouTube I would never have known anything about it. Nor about a whole range of excellent Dutch language music to which I spend a lot of time listening these days)!
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