France best selling albums ever: Notre-Dame De Paris (Live) Musical (1998)
On the back of monster selling Notre-Dame de Paris musical, a 2CD Live version was released as a cash-in item for Christmas season.
This strategy ended up being incredibly successful as this album titled Version Intégrale sat as a runner up to the original studio album during the entire Christmas season. In total, it spent 13 weeks inside the Top 3. By June 1999, sales topped a million units in France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland.
As some kind of sub-release, the album never got certified anywhere. Its very modest performances in Switzerland (never charted), Belgium (#9 peak and charted after Christmas season only) and Canada represent less than 100,000 units sold abroad by the time of its million copies sold.
This is confirmed by France Year end charts. The Live set was #13 bestseller of 1998, representing 600,000 units, and #10 in 1999 for 450,000 copies. Although not being as big as the studio album since 2000, the album still moved 115,000 copies since that date including over 45,000 in 2000.
Net shipment as of the end of 2015 is estimated at 1,165,000 copies.
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Sources: SNEP, IFOP, Billboard.