France best selling albums ever:
Génération Goldman by Various Artists (2012)

Being the perfect anti-star who is also hardly concerned by working when it isn’t needed led the artist to stop releasing new material since 2001. New collaborative label My Major Company, ironically created by the artist own son, Michael Goldman, decided to use all those years of non-exploited Goldman attraction by recording his biggest hits by fresh new stars including Christophe Willem, Zaz, M Pokora, Shy’m or Tal.

This perfect combo turned into a hit instantly reaching newly lowered Diamond status of 500,000 after a mere 29 days.

Yearly French sales stand as below:

• 2012: 510,000 (please note pre-2004 figures are raw data of IFOP panel sales, representing only 50/60% of sales depending on the product)
• 2013: 292,000
• 2014: 53,000
• 2015: 45,000

A grand total of exactly 900,000 copies sold. A bit short of a million, one would say. But that would be without considering sales of 2 CD package displayed below, released with the second volume album issued after the smash success of the first album.

It is the first case we met of such package release, which are incredibly frequent in France. Almost every big album has been released as part of a 2 / 3 CD box of similar albums from the same artist. As mentioned on the Introduction of this serie, as long as the cover of standalone album is part of the box front cover, sales will be merged together, which appears to be the case here.

This package is nearing 80,000 copies up to now, bringing retail sales at 980,000, enough for estimated shipment hitting the magical milestone.

Net shipment as of the end of 2015 is estimated at just 1 million copies. This is the 20th Jean-Jacques Goldman related album over this mark.

As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!