One might notice that the overwhelming majority of artists who sing in English while not being native English speakers are from Europe. The above is valid mostly for them.
Pretty much any band or singer there that communicates with spoken language and wants to make it has or had to use English at some point.
It's not only to make it on the world stage. Most bands rely on concerts - big and small, and/or club contracts, travelling left and right. When you make a living travelling throughout Europe for example, you need the lingua franca of music to impact your audience when every little bit counts. The lingua franca of non-classical music is English. The lingua franca of classical music is Italian. You can go in Italy and perform an Opera in Albanian if you wish, if you're good - it won't matter, but if you're a pop or rock singer - you lose points if your audience can't sing along with you, and you can't perform 30 concerts in 20 countries and sing in 15 languages.
Some countries that have enough weight on their own (= enough of an audience to make a living just roaming your own country) stick to their own language. Think France, where local laws pretty much guarantee musical success to any half-buttocked wanabee as long as they sing in French), which would make for some precious pearls grown in a sea of musical manure
Say - Trust, one of the few (excellent) heavy metal bands that kept to French. I am not sure whether they ever tried English when performing outside, but neither do I know how much they performed outside of France and Quebec.
Incidentally, I very strongly suspect that the lyrics for the above song were inspired by a well known (in its own country) Bulgarian poet who wrote something very similar in the thirties. Trust was very left-leaning, and this poet was translated in French by the Communists and advertised in their embassies. I don't know. I could be wrong. It's a thin thread to follow.
Then you have the one hit from Axel Bauer - Cargo de nuit (written by Serge Gainsbourg)...
And of course, the very amazing and very French Les Rita Mitsouko:
Then you have one other large enough country, with Rammstein, which sorta never had to switch to English to be amazing.
But that's about it, in my book. Everybody else had at least an English version of their local stuff.
Once you get out of Europe - this is no longer the case. You're either in English speaking countries if you're in north North America, either sing in Spanish and cover everything Mexico and south of it all the way to Antarctica. In Asia, you have plenty of countries that have the population critical mass needed to sustain a good living singing in a local language. India, Indonesia, Japan, China, Malaysia, Thailand - all are large enough to have local stars we never heard about, making boatloads of money and pulling millions of fans.
