Singen auf deutsch? Nein, auf englisch!

(translation: sing in german? no, in english!)

so i'm currently abroad in vienna, austria and my second night here i had the privilege of attending a cd release party for a local act, gasmac gilmore. the band itself was okay. not up my alley - they struck me as a mediocre system of a down with randomly inserted ska guitar parts. they did put on a pretty good show though, which included having a slide on stage and allowing people to slide down it which i thought was clever.

however, i don't really mean to do a review of the show as i knew zero of the songs and wasn't really all that into it. however, one thing struck me as odd during the show. gasmac gilmore sang everyone of their songs in english. this got me thinking, why do so many bands in non-english speaking countries sing in english? gasmac gilmore is obviously one example, but think about kings of convenience (norway), air (france), i'm from barcelona (sweeden)... i could name plenty more. so i spent the better part of my saturday evening wondering about this and i've got two potential theories:
(1) english simply lends itself to song better. i'm not an expert in languages so i don't know if this is true or not. maybe a linguistics major out there can help me out. but i mean there are obviously bands that do sing in other languages. rammstein sang in german and that worked out for them. so why shouldn't gasmac gilmore do so as well?
(2) bands go with english hoping that it will open the door for them to the larger music market of america (and perhaps britain as well - although someone mentioned that 'making it big' for a band from the uk might be considered making it in america. i'll defer on this to mindset's uk expert... kd, thoughts?) but i could see the dream of cracking the american market as a legitimate reason. i think it's safe to say america is one of (likely the) largest music market in the world, so bands likely dream of making it big there. and if you're going to do so, you're gonna have to be singing in english (at least most of the time, los del rio aside).

another reason was suggested to me by j siegel who is also across the pond with me, he says perhaps it is a way of groups paying tribute/honoring the fact that rock n roll is an american invention. maybe? but something tells me that gasmac gilmore doesn't care where rock is from...

please add some comments on this if you've got thoughts as i'm certainly interested to see what other people think. aufwiedersehen!