The very first Official South African Music Charts

For the past six weeks, The Official South African Music Charts (TOSAC) have been watched with keen interest as it celebrates the popularity and success of music enjoyed from diverse artists across the country.

The charts are a first in South Africa, both in scale and magnitude. Brought to you by the Recording Industry of South Africa (RiSA), and compiled by global music technology leaders BMAT Music Innovators, TOSAC kicked off with a focus on ‘singles’ in the digital music streaming space.

To ensure that the charts represent the broad South African digital music spectrum, TOSAC aggregates data from three Digital Streaming Platforms popularly used by local audiences: Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer. There will be more digital platforms added as and when agreements are reached with them.

BMAT uses their tech and expertise to accurately consolidate data from these platforms, as they already do in 21 other countries across the world as the official chart’s compiler of IFPI.

What’s on the charts:

• Weekly TOP 200 Tracks which takes into account all tracks streamed in South Africa, including both local and international music.
• Weekly TOP 100 Local ZA Tracks which only includes tracks wherein at least one of the credited artists is from South Africa.  

How the charts are aggregated:

• Chart week is Friday to Thursday.
• Songs are ranked by applying an economic weighting to the streams they get from participating digital streaming platforms (DSPs). For instance, subscription streams have more impact than ad supported streams.

Different versions of a track are aggregated to their corresponding original track, i.e.

• Radio Edits, Extended Edits or other slightly modified versions
• Remixes with additional featured artists
• DJ remixes, as long as the original artist is credited
• Different language version 

Covers are not aggregated to the original track.

“We have a robust music industry, 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.
“We understand the competitive nature of the digital streaming space and that consumers are spoiled for choice with access to local and international music charts as well as digital streaming apps.
“Our intention is to provide all South African music enthusiasts and general consumers with a platform that they can ‘own’ and one that reflects their own relationship with local and international music and their consumption patterns, irrespective of their taste in music. We also plan to consistently develop TOSAC platform and tailor it to accommodate our constantly changing consumer needs,”

Added Nhlanhla Sibisi, the CEO of RiSA.