Get your songs played on internet radio, satellite radio… places where you won’t need to have your label pay the program director to get him to play your song. Rely on word of mouth. Get people to listen to your music; if it’s good, they’ll insist that their friends listen to it too.
As I’ve already explained, you can still have money in the music world even when file sharing is legal and widespread. Just like there’s money in every other industry, even though people in those other industries don’t expect to keep getting paid for work they did in the past.
There is at least 1 webcomic (Something Positive) where the author got sufficient up-front donations to pay for the equivalent of his current salary, enabling him to quit his job to draw the comic for that year. I’m sure a similar model could work for musicians (“Pay my rent fro the month and I’ll put up two tracks for you to download - and I’ll mail a special bonus track to those who actually donated” sounds like it would be the musical equivalent of the free-comic-&-donation-gift-art webcomic model).
Of course, this requires direct involvement from the artists and little Government interference beyond infrastucture maintenance, so I doubt the French will go for it
