Streaming Music Isn’t Killing Local Music In France — It’s Growing It

The popularity of music streaming is soaring in France this year. And so are local artists.

In the first half of 2018, music streaming services in the country grew 39% from the same period last year. Also, streaming services now make up 56% of the total music market in France, up from 47% last year.

The numbers comes from SNEP, which is the country’s trade organization for recorded music. They reported that there were about 27 billion music streams in France in the 6-month period ending in June, which is more than a billion streams every week.

This compares to the 19.4 billion streams that were made during the same period last year, and the 12.8 billion steams made the year before that. In the first half of 2015, there were only 7.5 billion music streams.

Another impressive fact is that about 67% of the streams were made through paid services.

Also interesting is what French people are streaming. According to the SNEP numbers, local music acts are dominating the market. 19 of the top 20 albums this year were French, with Ed Sheeran’s Divide being the only foreign act in the list.

Yet another interesting fact is the plethora of rap acts in the top 20. A total of 16 of the acts in the list are considered rap artists.

These numbers should ease fears in the country that streaming would internationalize the music business in France at the expense of French-speaking recording artists, who enjoy the benefit of a quota system on the radio.

It seems that, even without quotas, the French prefer French-speaking artists.

Both physical recordings and downloads in France have been hurt by the success of music streaming. While in 2017 48% of music sales in France came from physical recordings and 5% from downloads, this year only 41% of sales came from physical sales and only 3% came from downloads.