France’s music trade body Snep have announced that streams from online music services will now count towards sales certifications for Gold, Platinum, Diamond records.

Awards for labels and artists reaching a sales milestone can now be achieved via streams as well. Snep, the body in charge of music certification in France, have revealed that all tracks and albums from January 2016 onwards will have their streams integrated into their sales numbers.

Interestingly Snep have decided to use the opposite method of integration, where most convert an amount of streams into a sale equivalent number Snep are converting sales into streams. 1 sale now equals 150 streams and counts towards the new stream-defined award certifications.

Originally a track that sold 250,000 units was awarded with a Diamond sales certification but from now on the limit you need to reach will be 35 million stream-equivalents. There are a number of reasons why Snep might want to work with streams instead of sales, the most obvious being the incredible rise in streaming service users which is quickly making music streaming the world’s largest form of access to music.

France has also seen a quickly dissipating download market which has broken the record for lowest sales 5 different times so far this year. The lowest recorded download sales for France in the ‘weekly most-downloaded tracks’ was achieved 5 weeks ago, showing 2,100 units sold. With sales like that no artist would ever be able to achieve a sales certification so Snep decided to step in and embrace the new form of consuming music via streaming.

Gold is given for tracks achieving 10 million-stream equivalents, while Platinum rewards those beyond 20 million and Diamond crowns songs surpassing 35 million

With the updated specifications 50 new tracks have been given awards from Snep. Snep’s chart will also be updated weekly from now on so we have an even better idea of who is ruling the charts in France.