The official French music charts are recognising the prominence of music streaming in the industry by introducing stats from streaming services.

As streaming has been rising massively over the past few years various countries’ music charts have been inducting streaming into the performance of tracks and albums. Billboard were one of the first in 2014 and the UK followed suit early last year, including streaming in the official UK charts for the first time ever.  Germany have also recently integrated streaming figures with sales in their charts.

Now French music body and official charting company Syndicat National de l’Édition Phonographique (SNEP) are getting with the times. SNEP introduced an individual chart for streaming figures back in 2014, aiming to integrate that into a combined chart of sales and streaming shortly after. Now, after a slight delay, music streaming is officially included with the sales charts.

Whilst SNEP haven’t made an official announcement themselves yet they made a statement on their partner website Charts in France. Music Business Worldwide translated their statement, which read: “To the contrary of the UK and the US, SNEP and GFK, the institute compiling the charts, have decided to multiply the sales figure (by 150) and add them to streaming data rather than dividing streaming by 150 and adding it to sales.”

This is different to Billboard and the Official UK Charts which scale streaming figures down into Streaming Equivalent Units – the amount of streams which equal a track or album sale. Charts in France reasoned their reverse technique, saying: “It seemed more logical to us to convert the data of the smaller trend to that of the bigger, and not the opposite.”

The French music industry has been seeing a fairly rapid drop in revenue over the past few years. The worldwide industry has been seeing similar reductions that have been counteracted by the rise in streaming, which is now giving the first rise in music revenues in years. Hopefully as streaming takes more prevalence, especially with France’s chart introduction, we can soon see their industry on the rise as well.