On January 23, 2025, Vietnam got something it had never had before: an official, industry-backed music chart. The Official Vietnam Chart, part of a six-country rollout by the IFPI, put a national ranking on a market that spent two decades defined by free downloads and stream-ripping. IFPI means the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the global recorded-music trade body.
The first number one was Duong Domic’s “Mat Ket Noi.” The bigger story is where those streams actually came from.
The chart is new. The listening habits are not.
The Official Vietnam Chart is compiled by BMAT and published every Tuesday, weighting free and paid streams from Apple Music, Deezer, Spotify, and YouTube, according to Music Business Worldwide. That is a clean, exportable signal for the first time.
But it does not capture the platforms where most Vietnamese listeners actually live. DSP means Digital Service Provider, the streaming stores that pay artists. In Vietnam, two of the biggest are homegrown.
Recent survey data compiled by Decision Lab puts Zing MP3 at a 45% penetration rate, second only to YouTube at 74%. That is ahead of TikTok at 32%, Spotify at 27%, and Apple Music at 9%.
Vietnam is a big-audience, small-payout market
The audience is enormous. The money is not, yet. The Vietnam digital music market is estimated at roughly $51.95 million for 2025, with more than half coming from streaming, per IMARC Group figures.
That gap between reach and revenue is the whole distribution problem. Here is what shapes it:
- Per-stream rates on local DSPs sit well below Western averages, reflecting low per-user revenue.
- Vietnam has historically ranked among the world’s highest-piracy markets, per IFPI consumer studies.
- Local platforms hold the deepest Vietnamese-language catalogs, so V-pop discovery happens there, not on Spotify.
An artist who charts on the Official Vietnam Chart is being measured on the four global DSPs. The listeners who made that happen were often on Zing MP3, NhacCuaTui, and YouTube.
The two local DSPs most distributors half-deliver
Zing MP3 is operated by VNG Corporation and launched in 2007. NhacCuaTui, run by NCT Corporation, launched the same year and competes head to head with a similar free and paid model.
Zing MP3 carries a catalog that is over 98% Vietnamese-licensed music, which is exactly why it keeps its share against the global players. For a V-pop or Vietnamese indie release, skipping it is not a rounding error. It is skipping the home market.
Where the delivery breaks
The pattern we see across the distributor field is uneven. Many global distributors deliver to Zing MP3 and simply skip NhacCuaTui, leaving roughly half the local audience uncovered. A track can be live in 180 countries and absent from one of the two apps its own fans open first.
Where the money leaks
The second gap is settlement. Local DSPs report and pay distributors in USD. A Vietnamese artist withdrawing to a VND bank account through a distributor with no local-currency rail eats FX spread and intermediate-bank fees on every payout. VND is the Vietnamese dong. Those fees compound on a market where the per-stream rate was already thin.
What this means for a Vietnamese release in 2026
The Official Vietnam Chart is a real milestone. It gives V-pop an exportable ranking and gives A&R scouts abroad a reason to watch Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. But charting on four DSPs while your fans stream on six is a coverage problem, not a talent problem.
The distributors that win Vietnamese catalog will be the ones delivering to both Zing MP3 and NhacCuaTui by default, using DDEX-native pipes so metadata does not degrade in the handoff. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the industry standard for delivering releases and reporting royalties. And they will settle in a way that does not tax an artist twice for living in Vietnam.
InterSpace Distribution is built for exactly that shape of market: full local-DSP coverage, DDEX-native delivery, and transparent splits paid through wallet.interspace.ink. When the chart is global but the audience is local, the distributor is the bridge.
