France Album Sales: M. Pokora
Mise A Jour (2010) Era
Mise A Jour is translated in English as Update and that’s exactly what M. Pokora was needing by 2010. Due to the struggle of MP3 and the absence of the singer for two years, an eternity for a teen-oriented act, the general public had pretty much forgotten about him when his fourth album was announced.
After mixtures of teen pop, rap and R&B, M. Pokora decided to start a new path with a love-themed album, clearly targeting the growing teen females he had seduced in the past. The sound wasn’t the only update of this record as the commercial strategy was new too. Trying to sell as many physical copies as possible to the fan base with various singles and tons of albums reissues was over, now the objective was to get songs listed on FM Radio stations. Thus, lead single Juste Une Photo De Toi never came out in CD format, debuting inside charts a huge 7 months after its airplay debut when downloads ultimately got included in the ranking in January 2011.
A #19 digital hit, the song had a nice longevity, also peaking at #33 in the Airplay chart. Not record breaking by any means, those performances enabled the album Mise A Jour to outperform its predecessor by entering at #4. The following single Mirage wasn’t big either, peaking at #64. The LP was having much more consistency than MP3 but it was still riding on low waters in the 51-200 section of the chart, selling only 35,000 units by the end of the year.
Luckily for M. Pokora, in France there is a 3-word miracle solution when your career is facing difficulties – Jean-Jacques Goldman. In March 2011, when hopes of healthy sales were over, he recorded and released a cover of Fredericks Goldman Jones 1990 smash, A Nos Actes Manqués, while he also participated in Danse Avec Les Stars TF1 show that he won. The single went to #8 while remaining for 12 weeks inside the Top 20, his very first real digital hit. The album got reissued to include the song climbing from #108 to #23. For five months, it never left the Top 50. The last single release, En Attendant la Fin, secured the album spot inside the Top 100 for the entire year while peaking at #24.
Never making the annual Airplay Artist Top 50 before, covering Goldman changed everything for M. Pokora who charted at #31 for the year 2011. This new exposure generated a total of 105,000 album sales for the year.
Top 3 Most Streamed Tracks on Spotify
- Juste Une Photo De Toi – 1,627,000
- A Nos Actes Manqués – 934,000
- En Attendant la Fin – 709,000