France best selling albums ever: Rouge by Fredericks Goldman Jones (1993)
In 1990, Jean-Jacques Goldman already proved switching from solo albums to be a part of a trio was a brilliant idea as he repeated his past success easily. In 1993, at the time of releasing a second studio album, the trio Fredericks Goldman Jones target was proving themselves successful in the long run.
This second album, Rouge, partially recorded in Moscow with a Russian army choir serving as background vocals, showed one more time Goldman can do no wrong. Although no single really got massive, sales of the album still proved how big he was. Quickly hitting #1 after its release in late 1993, it collected the top spot for Christmas week and sales along with it. Released at the end of November, the record was Platinum before the year end.
Almost everything was said and done after its seven weeks at #1. The album barely had to hold all along 1994 inside the Top 30 as singles were airing to accumulate large sales, hitting 900,000 copies by October. While the hype was clearly slowing down from that point, it was close enough to the million to reach it on August 17 1995, the exact same day Jean-Jacques Goldman written/composed album D’Eux, by Celine Dion, made the feat as well. The audit date, as we already know, are always delayed yet. In fact, the album sold a million by the end of April.
Out of charts for several months when he reached the million, the album only had catalog sales to rely on from there. It managed some, climbing to 1,115,000 units by February 1999. This was only 18 months before the first (and last) compilation of the band, Pluriel, was released.
While not the best Goldman-related catalog album, Rouge is still selling some copies to this day, ranking Top 500 in Amazon.fr as this article is being written. This is slightly misleading yet as the very atypical metallic package is quite hard to find in regular retailers, thus inflating the album results on this service.
Net shipment as of the end of 2015 is estimated at 1,200,000 copies.
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: SNEP, Nielsen, IFOP, Billboard, Le Monde, Amazon.