More than 100 Swiss Hits from the Charts

Switzerland has many pop and rock artists and sometimes even folklore or singer / songwriter tracks make their way to the Swiss charts. But only very few artists are known outside Switzerland and since the home market is limited (7 million inhabitants with four different official languages) most pop artists can't make a living from music alone. This page tries to give an overview of popular Swiss artists in the last 70 years and of the kind of music they have produced.

Swiss artists seem to be fond of experimenting with different styles and style mixes as well as playing with names. Or would you expect a band with the lovely name Krokus [crocus flower] to play Hardrock / Heavy Metal?

A warning: in a multicultural environment you cannot really tell the language of a song from the apparent language of its title nor from the name of the interpret.

For non-European readers: Eurovision, the European association of broadcasting and television companies, organizes the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) on a yearly basis. Every country may send one artist / group and the TV-show is broadcast simultaneously all over Europe. Switzerland's contributions to this contest are marked with an "e" in the ranking column. Some (like Lys Assia's Oh mein Papa) have even been winners of the contest. As the Eurovision Song Contest is some early form of talent / casting show with public voting this means that not all participants - not even the winners - have had much commercial success after the show. As to the youtube videos linked, even some Dutch or Swedish ESC fans have posted video recordings of Swiss ESC-participants, so the introductions are in their languages.

Swiss Hits before 1968

American Dixieland and Swing style had quite some influence from the 1920's to the 1940's, leading to some interesting crossover compositions of Swiss Folklore × Swing. Swiss Charts were only introduced in 1968, so Chart positions are not applicable to older songs. But a list of the most successful older hits can be extracted from CD samplers and radio shows allowing people to choose what they'd like to hear.

Hits from the Swiss Charts since 1968

* = this Rock song features a Swiss alphorn played in a quite unusual way

• An analysis of chart positions reached by popular Swiss artists shows that the Swiss population does not necessarily give a "national bonus" to Swiss artists. Much to the contrary, Swiss musicians do have a really hard time getting to the top. If we are looking at the rankings since 2004, it seems that this is changing slightly, however.
• As of June 2015, Swiss D.J. Bobo is the 5th most successful interpret right after Madonna, Michael Jackson, Céline Dion and Eros Ramazotti in Switzerland's all time best artists charts (since 1968), but the next Swiss artists are ranking quite low: Gölä (#41), Bligg (#58), Züri West (#60), Stress (#68), DJ Antoine (#70), Baschi (#78) Polo Hofer (#88), Florian Ast (#89) and Yello (#99). All other Swiss artists can't be found among the top 100 ... unless you claim U.S. born singer Tina Turner (#12) or Phil Collins (#28) living in Switzerland as Swiss acts. The number of Swiss musicians in this list was definitely smaller in 2005.
• Though Yodeling is an important feature in Swiss folklore, most Swiss people can't sing in this special way. But evidently synthesizers can be programmed to do so, see the 1985 experimental track Yo-Lollo-Diuh by Matterhorn Project.
• Some of the hits mentioned have no ranking, though they are well remembered - this may be due to the fact that the official Swiss charts only published rankings from #1 to #10 from 1968 to the 1980's, so people remember the songs, but you can't find rankings for them. Other songs listed here were indeed not commercially succesful at the time. This is particularly true for Mani Matter the most popular Swiss singer-songwriter. Until his early death in a car accident in 1972 there were no records published, but afterwards recordings from the radio studio and from live concerts have been published - and you can still buy them on CD more than 40 years later.

• Swiss Singers and Songwriters

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