Archive
Everything on the site, by section
Eighteen pieces across four sections. The front page carries a handful of them; this is the rest.
- French rap charted from the 93, not ParisGEOGRAPHYThe dominant French genre is rap, and its geography is the ring of suburbs around Paris and the port cities, not the Rive Gauche. That is a fact about where studios, labels and audiences actually are.
- Seine-Saint-Denis charted without relocating to ParisGEOGRAPHYThe 93 produced a run of artists who went from local circulation to national charts without ever relocating the work, and the ring road turned out to be an address rather than a boundary.
- Four cities, one ring of suburbs, and the addresses on the chartGEOGRAPHYMarseille has its own labels, its own studios and an accent that stays on the record. Jul built a catalogue and an audience largely outside the Paris industry and then filled the Vélodrome with it.
- Bigflo & Oli went diamond without losing the accentGEOGRAPHYBigflo & Oli made the city a subject rather than a starting point, which is a different relationship to a home town than most French pop has.
- Stromae and Angèle chart in France without crossing anythingGEOGRAPHYStromae and Angèle both work in French, both come from Brussels, and neither is French — which the charts have never found confusing and the framing often does.
- Aya Nakamura streams more than any French-language artist aliveNOWAya Nakamura sings in a register the Académie does not recognise, has the streaming figures to make that argument academic, and opened the 2024 Olympics in front of the Garde Républicaine.
- Stromae’s Multitude arrived as argument, not comebackNOWMultitude arrived after years away and treated the gap as material rather than something to apologise for.
- Zaho de Sagazan swept three Victoires with chanson phrasingNOWZaho de Sagazan took the Victoires in 2024 with a record built on French chanson phrasing over electronic arrangement.
- Angèle, Luciani and Armanet still write words firstNOWAngèle, Clara Luciani and Juliette Armanet write in a tradition where the words lead and the arrangement follows, which is the oldest French pop instinct there is.
- Ninho’s diamonds came from repeat listenersNOWNinho and Damso hold certification records that are really records about streaming arithmetic, and the arithmetic changed in 2016.
- Rooms, leases and who ends up owning the catalogueLABELSA studio is a fixed cost with a lease, which is why scenes cluster around the rooms that exist rather than the places people imagine.
- Because Music and Ed Banger both exported coherenceLABELSBecause Music and Ed Banger built rosters that travelled, and the second one gave French electronic music a house style for a decade.
- Universal bought Barclay and inherited decades of chansonLABELSOwnership of a catalogue outlives the label that made it, and most French catalogue has changed hands at least once.
- Streaming repriced the track and French albums grew longerLABELSPer-stream payment rewards more tracks and shorter ones, and French albums have changed shape accordingly.
- The quota, the ceremony and the chart, read togetherAWARDSThe Toubon law set a minimum share of French-language music on the radio. Thirty years on it still shapes playlists, and the argument about it has never actually stopped.
- SACEM’s Victoires ignored Ninho during his diamond runAWARDSThe Victoires de la Musique is the industry's own reading of the year, which makes its omissions as informative as its winners.
- Radio programmers schedule Victoires nominees to fill the quotaAWARDSSomebody has to fill the hours, meet the quota and keep the audience, and those three are not the same job.
- L’Olympia still measures what certification cannotAWARDSA career in French music is still legible as a sequence of rooms, each one roughly four times the last.