France Best Selling Albums Ever

Live Albums

01 Simon & Garfunkel – The Concert In Central Park (1982) : 1 245 000
02 Phil Collins – Serious Hits… Live (1990) : 1 235 000
03 Musical – Notre-Dame De Paris (Intégrale) (1998) : 1 170 000
04 AC/DC – Live (1992) : 1 160 000
05 Nirvana – Unplugged In New-York (1994) : 1 120 000

It takes a lot to sell 1 million copies of a single album in France, let alone of a Live album. In France, almost all successful album eras are concluded with the release of a related Live set. Those albums usually sell from 20% to 50% of the studio album. During the 90s, many of those albums from the likes Céline Dion, Mylène Farmer or Patricia Kaas made it past 2xPlatinum, representing 600,000 units, but none ever sold a million.

The ‘era conclusion’ live set that ever sold a million copies is the special case of Notre-Dame De Paris. This is the entire irony of this list as while the immense majority of live sets sold are directly related to an album era, the remaining four albums all ended up as million sellers mostly because during several years they were regarded as some kind of hits package for related artists. Only Simon & Garfunkel already had a best of available but it was already old while the live set was highly hyped. The AC/DC album has been one of the very best selling catalog albums of the last 20 years.