French Pop History

  Back on the first post on this blog, I touched on the early French charts. I’ve been away recently, and tied up with promotional work for the  BOOK  (hence the lack of posts) but as I’ve got a little time free today, I thought I would revisit a post I originally made on the UK Mix chart site, updating it to include as near as definitive an account of the various charts as I can make. As I stated at the top of that earlier post, the history of the French music chart is very messy . To begin with, there was no official French chart until November 1984, when the top 50 was published for the first time. This was a sales chart and seems to have been accepted as accurate from the start, although like most other country's charts at the time, it would have been based on sales from sampled retail outlets, and so not 100% reliable (it would take the universal use of bar code scanners to overcome that hurdle). It was certainly close enough to be seen as authoritative and was certainly a b