For years, charts have been a place where musicians can see how well their music has been received in different territories. The Billboard Hot 100 in America and The Official Charts in the UK have been a massive player in making and breaking artists and many other countries followed suit by tallying up airplay, streams, video views and more and consolidating that into one official list.
Now, as South Africa officially has a chart of its own as the Recording Industry of South Africa finally launches the country’s first official music chart.
The Official South Africa Music Charts (TOSAC) kicks off by launching two charts with a focus on singles in the digital music streaming space. The charts will celebrate the popularity and success of the music being enjoyed from diverse artists by music fans across the country.
The ‘Weekly TOP 200 Tracks’ chart will take into account all tracks streamed in South Africa, including both local and international music; and the ‘Weekly TOP 100 Local ZA Tracks’ chart will only include tracks wherein at least one of the credited artists is from South Africa.
To ensure accuracy and that the charts represent the broad South African digital music spectrum, TOSAC will aggregate data from three digital streaming platforms popularly used by local audiences: Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer.
“We are incredibly excited to be launching such a pioneering platform for the South African music industry and audiences, across different genres,” Sean Watson, the Chairperson of RiSA says. “This represents a significant milestone and a much needed step up to aligning with popular forms of music consumption for the local music industry.
Nhlanhla Sibisi, the CEO of RiSA adds “We have a robust music industry in our country, and our people have a natural thirst for music. We have also seen an undeniable shift in how people consume music in the past few years, with more and more audiences making use of streaming services than before. We are thus excited to put in place an offering that not only recognises that but is set to help drive the growth of our industry.”
How the charts are aggregated:
• Chart week will be from Friday to Thursday.
• Only digital streaming numbers are taken into account.
• The number of streams shown in the charts is always weighted, so that subscription streams have more relevance than ad-funded streams.
• Currently, no track exclusion policy or Accelerated Decline method is being applied.
Different versions of a track are aggregated to their corresponding original track, i.e.
• Radio Edits
• Same song with additional featuring artists
• DJs remixes, as long as the original artist is credited
• Different language/country versions
Album covers are not aggregated to the original track.
‘Bad Habits’, the latest single from pop sensation Ed Sheeran makes history as the first number one track on the Weekly TOP 200 Tracks chart while DJ Maphorisa and Tyler ICU’s ‘Izolo’ takes the first number one spot on the Weekly TOP 100 Local ZA Tracks chart.
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Visit www.theofficialsacharts.co.za for more information.
