France best selling albums ever:
Back To Bedlam by James Blunt (2005)

The good thing about release to date sales is that they always keep climbing. James Blunt popularity may be way down from his immaculate years a decade ago and his yearly sales low by now, it doesn’t prevent Back To Bedlam from breaking the million mark in 2016.

If you have been following Chartmasters.org since its beginning, or even since a few months only, you likely know about the crossover logic in the music industry. Artists get promoted to specific target audiences, first small local ones, then genre specific channels and ultimately across the general public when their appeal is huge enough. Very few artists reach the A-League of the industry at a worldwide scale and the few who did it often took various albums to achieve the feat.

At times the appeal is just so strong that we barely got time to first hear about an artist that even our beloved mothers know about him too. That’s exactly what happened with James Blunt. His debut album Back To Bedlam came out in October 2004 in the UK. After various months, nobody knew about it. That’s no exaggeration – the album sold an abysmal 482 copies on its first week in the artist native country and 4,759 units by the end of the year. As 2005 summer arrived, everything suddenly changed.

Both first singles High and Wisemen weren’t strong enough to crossover playlists without being backed with notable promotion. You’re Beautiful was. With it, the album entered UK Charts nearly six months after its release and shot all the way up to #1. It wasn’t a random #1 as it went on to shift more than 100,000 units per week in July and August, the worst period for sales. Such a massively powerful weapon opened every possible door in no time, including those leading to international success…