France was the world’s sixth-biggest recorded-music market in 2024 with 7.5% growth that year according to the IFPI. Now French labels body SNEP has published its mid-year figures for 2025.
The good news is that the market is still growing. The not-so-good news is that the growth has slowed, and paid subscriptions in France are still underperforming the music industry’s expectations.
The overall market grew by 3.4% year-on-year to €432m ($507.8m at current exchange rates) in the first half of 2025 according to SNEP’s figures. Nearly 63% of those revenues came from subscriptions, which were up 4.9%.
“This performance remains below expectations,” was SNEP’s verdict on the latter figure, although it added that “this foundation helps maintain the momentum of a music market that is more resilient than other entertainment sectors”.
SNEP also highlighted a 4.4% increase in physical sales – including a 9.4% spike for vinyl – and noted that while ad-supported audio streaming revenues grew by 2%, video was down 6.8% because of “the decline of traditional clips [long-form music videos] in favour of short formats or ‘visualisers’, mainly on social networks”.
These are all themes we have seen in other countries: slowing subscriptions growth, and wobbly ad-supported revenues amid the surge of still-under-monetised short video.
An upcoming Music Ally country profile of France will shed more light on trends within the country, including some positives.
As in neighbour Germany, domestic artists have increased their share of the market: two thirds of the top 200 albums in France last year were from local artists, including 18 of the top 20. Meanwhile, the export value of French music grew by 19% in 2024.
Guilhelm Cottet, director general of indies association UPFI, told us that streaming’s growth is “hampered by structural obstacles: too high a concentration of revenues on a few artists, the excessive power of the majors… [and] the dilution of music’s value by AI and fraud”.
However, Deezer’s director of music and culture Azzedine Fall was more optimistic. “Precisely because streaming hasn’t fully penetrated the market yet, there’s a beautiful sense of possibility: a chance for the next wave of artists, platforms and fans to grow together in a space that still has so much potential to bloom.”
This week, SNEP’s director general Alexandre Lasch offered his organisation’s take on what’s required for that blooming.
“When it comes to streaming, the challenge is no longer just to recruit new subscribers, but to expand usage. We need to both retain younger generations, who favour short, fragmented formats, and attract an older audience that is still underrepresented on platforms,” he said.
