France is the latest country to include plays from Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music et al in its single and album charts. In a week when Spotify announced a user base of 100 million, France’s top 100 is now derived from streamed plays along with downloads and physical sales.
It’s taken Syndicat National de l’Édition Phonographique two years to make the change. But rather than fall into line with other countries, who’ve equated 150 streams with one sale, it has changed the emphasis and equated one sale with 150 streams. The difference may seem semantic, but en France, it’s the digital stream that’s the industry's standard unit, not the CD nor download. “It seemed more logical to us to convert the data of the smaller trend to that of the bigger, and not the opposite,” it said.
It’s the latest shift in the steady evolution of streaming sites contributing to official charts, which began in 2007 when Yahoo! Music and AOL Music streams made up five per cent of the Billboard Hot 100 data (side note: it also used jukebox plays back in the 1950s).
Streams largely influenced major singles charts by 2014. In most of the largest music territories, a figure that reflects local market conditions is equated as one sale: in the UK and Ireland it’s 100, in Spain it’s 250.
The conversion becomes so complicated with albums, you'd need a degree in statistics to figure it out, especially in the case of Germany's convoluted scoring system. In 2015, the UK created a simplified approach, whereby a sale was the same as 1,500 plays of the 12 most popular tracks from an album with the two highest played songs, likely to be singles, downweighted. Despite its bold assumption about how an album should be structured, the system was adopted by France, and it mirrors the US album charts, which also counts YouTube as a streaming service.
The changes have made a significant impact: the UK reported that last year, streams accounted for over a quarter of album “sales” and two thirds of its singles chart.
