So here's a very niche bit of confusion that I've been harbouring for YEARS regarding Belarus 2007, Work Your Magic by Dmitry Koldun, and France 2007, L'amour à la française by Les Fatals Picards.

The opening string arrangement in Work Your Magic is pretty distinctive, and repeats a lot in the song, so it becomes fairly memorable and recognisable very quickly. So when listening to L'amour à la française, I was very confused when, about 1 minute into the song, there is a short instrumental break that includes the very same string arrangement used in Work Your Magic.

For a long time I thought, did France sample Belarus? The song is very playful in its presentation so I wouldn't be surprised if they had done so as a little light-hearted moment. And looking at the release dates - Belarus chose its song in January 2007, France in March - it wouldn't have been possible for Koldun to have heard LFP's song first. So I therefore assumed the band just had a bit of fun with producing their song.

But I could never find any reference anywhere to the two songs having the same string part. There seemed to be no mention of this on any site I looked at, and I just found it peculiar that this would go unnoticed.

Today however, after once again diving into the rabbit hole, I read on the Wikipedia page for WYM that "the main string loop of the song was available commercially as "cinematic 11 orchestra 2" in the Cinematic volume of the Orchestral Series of Sony Sound Series libraries", which then makes it plausible that France could have easily accessed and used the same sound clip.

But still, the question remains - why? The absolute coincidence of two songs using the same commercially available sound clip completely independently and then ending up in the same music event on the same year seems far too against any odds. But for Les Fatals Picards to have the foresight to say, "Hey, that Belarussian song is going to be popular and it has this string part we could use" also just seems weird.

Help me out please Reddit. Is there something I'm missing? Or am I just overthinking this?