Fifty-five years after its birth, the French singles chart has reached a new milestone.
In September 2014, Snep, the French music business body, introduced a streaming chart with the hope of releasing a combined sales + streaming chart within a few months.
The wait lasted far more than that, and was brought to an end only last week.
The news did not make headlines – in fact Snep itself has not yet made any official public statement about it.
Instead, they made a brief statement available on their partner website, chartsinfrance.com, along with the chart itself which is available nowhere else for the time being.
The article states (translated): “To the contrary of the UK and the US, Snep and GfK, the institute compiling the charts, have decided to multiply the sales figures (by 150) and add them to streaming data rather than dividing streaming by 150 and adding it to sales”.
This ultimately yields the same final rankings, but Snep is quoted in saying that “it seemed more logical to us to convert the data of the smaller trend to that of the bigger, and not the opposite”.
France has thus just introduced the sales-equivalent-streaming ratio!
The first chart of this new era sees Drake’s ‘One Dance’ (pictured) leading the tally, with 2.88m “units” made up of 2.47 million plays and 2,700 downloads.
The biggest-selling track of the week, Justin Timberlake’s ‘Can’t Stop The Feeling’, only lands at number 3.
This article was created for MBW by Elia Habib. Follow Elia on Twitter here (@EliaHabib1) and check out his blog all about the French music market through here (www.muzhit.com).Music Business Worldwide
