Can someone explain this phenomenon

19 comments

1. When these covers were popular in 60-80, the english proficiency was not as high as today, so finnish pop artists made these finnish language covers to appeal to as large a national audience as possible.

2. It made sense: the melody had already been proven catchy in the original country, so success was more guaranteed than by making songs from scratch. Audiences appreciated translated lyrics.

3. Finnish music industry used to be quite lacking when it came to pop in the 70’s or so. Finnish compositions were often outdated and everything sort of lagged behind global trends. Record company executives had international connections and noticed that there’s plenty of foreign music that could work in Finland if not for the language.

   This started a mass production of translated foreign hits. Italian ones were especially popular. Finnish production started catching up in the 80’s and eventually the use of translated songs ceased being necessary.

   “Juna Turkuun” is a legendary one because both the lyrics and the performance are damn clunky. It ended up becoming a small meme song in the internet era.

4. That has definitely happened in other places. Mexican Rock and Roll in the late 50s was just Spanish versions of US hits.

5. Money

6. I’d guess it was easier and cheaper to buy rights to translate existing hit song than produce one from scratch. And apparently local artist/composers were more like a man with accordion during that time so there was large contrasts between domestic and foreign music.

7. And it was done all over Europe at the time. Not in any way limited to Finland only.

   Cover songs in wider sense were more common than nowadays. In US, a lot of the popular music from the early 1980s era are actually covers

8. This is also very common in Brazil.

9. It was extremely common in other countries as well. Elvis did mostly covers, like Love Me Tender ( Aura Lee), I Can’t Help Falling in Love (Plaisir D’amour), It’s Now or Never (O Sole Mio). Italian, Spanish and French songs especially have been popular in the US in translated versions

   This has been very common in the 1930’s-1980’s all over the world. German, French, Italian and Swedish top 50 in the 1960s used to be mostly covers, for instance.

   If you want to hear some really good ones in Finnish, try Olavi Virta (Hopeinen Kuu), Laila Kinnunen or Kirka. Frederik is more of an acquired taste.

10. To be honest, this isn’t only present in Finland. In my home country, French songs got “arranged” all the time back in the 70’s and the 80’s as art started to thrive in the country. I’m not sure if this was the case in Finland, but for us “Western Music” was new so we copied a lot from them at the beginning.

11. Idk where you are from but I have seen this before many times in many countries. Its quite normal in my home country as well especially for trendy songs.

12. It was very common in Czech in the past. It still happens, maybe not as often, but still. I always thought it was because of the communist regime. Anything coming from the west was “bad”, but if you do a remake, it’s all good. Growing up, I was so surprised how many “czech classics” are not Czech at all 🤣

13. No. 😃 Original is something beautiful but this version doesn’t make any sense.

14. This was very common back in the day when listeners around the world didn’t really speak many languages.

15. You haven’t seen this in other countries? Isn’t France like famous for dubbing and covering absolutely everything?

16. There was a strong live music “dance hall” culture back then which had been dominated by tango and such for a long time and it was very much so that the touring “dance music bands” all played the same catalog of songs. People dancing to a DJ wasn’t much of a thing yet. Popular music was transitioning, tango and folk music was phasing out. The audience wanted modern music and live music so the bands played covers of contemporary foreign hit songs as there was no local catalog yet. The singers or the audiences didn’t understand English or other foreign languages so localized lyrics were needed.

    There was more distinct separation of composition and performance back then anyway. When someone made a good song, it was quite normal that multiple singers performed or recorded their own versions of it. The Eurovision qualifiers in the early days were done so that each song was performed by two different singers, it was more a song writer than singer competition. The singers were more clearly known and presented as interpreters of songs, not musicians.

    It was also an easy way for the record companies to make quick easy money. Take a foreign popular song, write Finnish lyrics and have some popular artist perform it on record. A foreign hit might take months or even years to become known in Finland, so there was a bit of time to make a localized version popular first. They didn’t make big noise about them being translations either, many in the audience didn’t even realize they were covers. This was also a business for the record companies of the original versions, instead of pushing the original versions to people who wouldn’t understand it, they offered the rights to the hit songs all over to different countries and made extra some money from market areas they didn’t think their own artist would succeed in.

    There wasn’t that many great song writers back then as it wasn’t a very viable career choice yet. To get a bunch of songs for a potential new found pop star that was a good singer and good looking, the handful of local lyricists could churn out new localized lyrics for foreign hits songs by the dozen in no time. The studio bands could make the backing track in an afternoon to mimick the original.

17. Music composers in Bollywood, India during 70s, 80s, and 90s also borrowed music from all over the world and song writers wrote lyrics that fir the compositions. Search for the song ‘Mere rang mein rangane wali’ for example and figure out the original. 😄

18. As a French, I can confirm that it was very common in France too.

    Btw, Seija Simola participated to the Eurovision Song Contest in 1978 in Paris. I never understood why she had only obtained 4 points with “Anna rakkaudelle tilaisuus”, I always found this song beautiful.

19. You have not seen this in other countries just means you have not noticed it in other countries. Because you might not have been privy to the original songs and thus did not recognise these songs as translated.

    There are so so many and every major language does this.

    Back in the day I used to see how many versions of some popular songs could I find from around the world. There were so many versions from different languages, different styles and different periods.

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