After an energetic performance of her song ‘‘The Party’s Over,’’ the Russian pop star Valeriya paused to deliver a sound bite. ‘‘Music has no borders!” she shouted to a crowd of music industry executives at a recent conference in Cannes.

For the likes of Mick Jagger or Madonna, that may be true. But only a small handful of Russian artists have ever managed to cross the musical frontier between their country and the West. And the Russianmarket is dominated by domestic acts.

Now Valeriya and several other Russian rockers are trying to change that, fine-tuning their repertoires for European, Asian and, perhaps, American audiences. Meanwhile, Russian record companies are wooing Western partners to sell their music in Russia, a country in which many have treaded very cautiously until now.

‘‘I don’t want to stay still,’’ Valeriya said in lightly accented English during a meeting with journalists in Cannes.

‘‘I want to move on. I offer a very competitive repertoire, and the audience can feel something new.” For Valeriya, a slender platinum blonde whose real name is Alla Yurievna Perfilova, moving on is about personal ambition, but it is also a business imperative. Several of her first nine albums sold more than a million copies.

But her latest record, “Out of Control,” which was recorded in Russian and English, has generated sales of only 250,000 CDs.

Valeriya blames piracy, a problem that is particularly acute in Russia.

Over all, music sales fell 21 percent there in the first half of last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group, and the decline probably accelerated in the second half of the year as the economic crisis intensified. A majority of the compact discs sold in Russia are unauthorized copies, and digital sales are virtually nonexistent.

To make money from their music, Russian artists have had to rely largely on live performances. Valeriya said she had done about 1,000 shows over the past five years — for crowds in stadiums, for oligarchs in their homes and for ethnic Russian audiences in places like Germany and Israel.

‘‘Russians had to learn how to make money in very tough conditions, so they are survivors,” said Ilya Buts, editorial director of the Russian edition of Billboard magazine. As a result, they might even be able to show their counterparts elsewhere a thing or two, he added.

Given the headaches that Russia has created for the music industry, it is unlikely that many people are looking there for answers. Yet even the Western record companies are starting to experiment with a business model that has been the norm in Russia for years, with a single company handling artist management, merchandising and other functions in addition to releasing records and publishing music.

Valeriya is not the first Russian pop star to break out of Russia. About six years ago, an act called Tatu, consisting of two teenage female singers, landed on the British and American charts.

But critics say Tatu’s success was based largely on the novelty surrounding the two singers’ supposed lesbian relationship; once that faded, so did Tatu’s international careers.

Valeriya, by contrast, is an established, 40-year-old artist who has been described as a Russian version of Madonna. She and her handlers are thinking big, planning a multipronged assault on the British and American markets.

By the end of the month her label, Nox Records — run by her third husband, Josef Prigozhin — plans to send copies of a single, ‘‘Wild,” to 300 clubs and DJs around the United States, to test the audience for her music there.

While imported copies of ‘‘Out of Control” can already be found in Russianowned shops in neighborhoods like Brighton Beach in New York, Nox Records also envisions a mainstream U.S.

release for the album, said Vladimir Voronkov, who manages Nox outside Russia.

But the challenges of succeeding outside Russia have been demonstrated in Britain. Despite a publicity blitz that landed Valeriya on the covers of magazines and the features pages of Sunday newspapers, Nox Records is still scrambling to find a distributor for the British release of ‘‘Out of Control,” which is planned for this spring. The company thought it had a distributor in place last year, but it went out of business, a victim of the credit crunch.