Oh the languages again. Many people don't know that it was the US, and not the UK, who mostly contributed to the spread of English -- of course one might argue that US talk English in first place due to the UK. That world-wide'fication started after the WWII. In Europe, for instance, the number of students learning English as first foreign language only surpassed French ones by the 50s and 60s in most countries (sorry, can't point now to the document in which I saw this info).

Why was it so massive? Due the huge world-wide US influence associated with the mass communication that was being established as mainstream by that time. It were the movies, the TV shows, the music. On tech it were the electronics, then computer science and then internet. Suddenly it was a snowball: the aeronautics, the navigation, the research papers, the international treaties, you name it... all in English.

We've got to a point where if a given music is in its original language, it runs the risk of being mostly unknown, but if it's translated to English, it might be a huge success (see Claude François's Comme d'habitude vs Frank Sinatra's My Way, just to name one).

No language can ever surpass English until all this shifts to that language, and that's very unlikely to happen. US made it big at the right time, now it's too late change that.