SACEM’s Victoires ignored Ninho during his diamond run
The Victoires de la Musique is the industry's own reading of the year, which makes its omissions as informative as its winners.
What the ceremony is, and who runs it
The Victoires de la Musique has been handed out since 1985, making it the longest-running major music award in France. It is organised under the supervision of SACEM, the performing-rights society, alongside broadcasters and industry bodies — which is to say that the room voting is largely the room benefiting. The ceremony airs on France Télévisions and typically draws several million viewers, giving it a reach that no other French music award can match. Nominations are determined by a professional jury; a public vote then decides some categories. That split matters, because the two electorates tend to want different things, and the results show it.
The categories shift from year to year — sometimes split by genre, sometimes collapsed into broader ones — which makes direct comparison across decades awkward. What does not shift is the overall tendency: the Victoires rewards craft and legibility. A song the industry can explain wins more often than a song it cannot quite place.
Where it lands well, and where it consistently doesn't
In 2024, Zaho de Sagazan took three Victoires, including Album of the Year for La Symphonie des éclairs — a genuine instance of the ceremony recognising something that had not been pre-cleared by commercial logic. The record was quiet, dense, and rooted in chanson phrasing rather than streaming-optimised structure. It was the kind of win that gets cited when people defend the award's purpose.
More often, the Victoires lands on the safer side of the available choice. Rap — the genre that has dominated the French charts since the mid-2010s — was structurally underrepresented for years. Artists like Ninho and Jul, who between them hold some of the highest certification figures SNEP has ever recorded, went largely without nominations during their most commercially dominant periods. The Rap/Urban category, when it exists, tends to feel like a concession rather than a reckoning. The ceremony's relationship with that geography — the banlieue, Seine-Saint-Denis, Marseille — has never been easy, and the nominees list has often made the discomfort visible.
The Belgian question is instructive in a different way. Stromae won Victoires across multiple ceremonies and is now canonical in France despite never being French. Angèle has also been recognised. Brussels is, in this sense, more legible to the Victoires than the 93 — which tells you something about which kind of otherness the industry finds comfortable.
The barometer problem
An award run by the industry measures the industry's self-image, which is not the same thing as the year in music. The Loi Toubon quota system, in place since 1994, pushed radio toward French-language music and shaped what the industry considered mainstream. The Victoires reflects that history: chanson, pop with visible lyrics, and prestige singer-songwriters occupy the architecture of the ceremony in a way that rap, electronic music and anything genuinely hybrid still have to negotiate around.
The Centre national de la musique, which now sits alongside SACEM as a structural pillar of French music policy, has pushed toward a broader understanding of what the industry actually contains. Whether the Victoires has kept pace is a reasonable question. The ceremony at L'Olympia or the Salle Pleyel carries weight precisely because French music careers are still read as a sequence of validated rooms — and a Victoire is one of the most legible validations available. The omissions, therefore, are not neutral. When an artist who has sold more than anyone else in a given year does not appear on the nominations list, the barometer is not just behind; it is telling you what the industry has decided not to count.
That gap between the chart and the ceremony is where the most interesting arguments in French music currently live.