France Best Selling Albums Ever:
Update Part 6 (41-21)

#21 – 12,000

Francis Cabrel – Cabrel 77-87 (1987) : 1 530 000

How to better close this article than by meeting again with Francis Cabrel? The situation of Cabrel 77-87 is quite atypical. In fact, it keeps selling well with 21 weeks in the Catalog Chart including 10 high enough to be inside the Comprehensive Chart in spite of the more comprehensive package L’Essentiel 77-07 issued 20 years later. One need to understand that the singer-songwriter career had two parts. If he always remained a poet with cult melodies, his albums up to 1987 had some kind of garage-like sound also with the singer original rural voice. All of them were strongly successful, selling anything from 300,000 units to half a million copies. From 1989, his records started to be more professional, produced and played by the best engineers and musicians from French industry with plenty of work involved. With this new background his next three records Sarbacane, Samedi Soir Sur La Terre and Hors-Saison went on to sell more than 7 million units combined. Thus, even if the artist issued a lot of precious songs post-87, most consumers already own all studio albums issued after that date, which explains why the demand is still huge around Cabrel 77-87 set. In this way, it is close to the Eagles Greatest Hits 71-75 that covers all pre-Hotel California, e.g. pre-ground breaking sales and thus the best way to cover the band discography after having bought the 1976 studio album.

As usual, feel free to comment!

Sources: SNEP, Chartmasters.org.