GfK Entertainment charts
music charts in Germany by GfK Entertainment
The GfK Entertainment charts are the official charts for music, home video, and video games in Germany and are gathered and published by GfK Entertainment (formerly Media Control and Media Control GfK International), a subsidiary of GfK, on behalf of Bundesverband Musikindustrie. GfK Entertainment is the provider of weekly Top 100 single and album charts, as well as various other chart formats for genres like compilations, jazz, classical music, schlager, hip hop, dance, comedy, and music videos. Following a lawsuit in March 2014 by Media Control AG, Media Control GfK International had to change its name.
Dissemination of the charts is conducted by various media outlets, some of which include MTV music channel, and the Swiss charts website. Other entities that present the charts are MusicLoad and Mix 1, both of which are online associations that post almost all the charts published by GfK Entertainment on a weekly basis. Furthermore, GfK Entertainment also runs a dedicated website providing chart-related news and access to most of the charts.
History
Charts were first published in West Germany in 1959, in the magazine Der Musikmarkt (The Music Market), which has played an important role in the German music industry. Since 1959, the growing desire to have a well-developed music program has made Bundesverband Musikindustrie work together with charts providers to improve the way the charts are determined.
For this purpose, different research institutes were tested, out of which Media Control, based in Baden-Baden, was selected. Hence, the first official charts were made available in the magazine Der Musikmarkt in September 1977.
The public source identifies “GfK Entertainment charts” as music charts in Germany by GfK Entertainment. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Entertainment, charts and music.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64305519. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 1959 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “GfK Entertainment charts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.