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When you are old enough to get your new album produced by your own son, I guess it tells something about your longevity, especially when you started at 16. Despite already being the best selling artist of all-time by 1999, Johnny Hallyday had yet to get a million selling album.
After two albums which sold over 4,5 million together, the 1999 comeback of Francis Cabrel was one of the most anticipated of all-time. Hardly the most active act when it comes to promotion, the poetic singer crushed absolutely everyone in terms of sales per album during a decade, even the likes Johnny Hallyday, Patrick Bruel or Jean-Jacques Goldman.
By 1993, Patrick Bruel held the highest selling French album of all-time with his 1989 release Alors Regarde. As it often happens with such a sudden and disproportionate success, the singer suffered a strong backlash and follow up 1994 release, although selling decently for most artists, ended being a strong disappointment. Thus, Juste Avant was a pivotal album, re-installing the artist as a major seller or marking him as a one-album wonder.
One of the most recognizable figure in French music scene, Mylène Farmer was in front of a difficult exercise in 1999. Indeed, meeting expectations after three consecutive million selling studio albums is still a complicated target even for such a successful artist. Innamoramento did manage to reach the coveted million plateau establishing even more the widespread appeal of the discrete singer.
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After eight up and down studio albums from 1974 to 1988 with mostly average sellers, Alain Souchon finally made it big at almost 50 in 1993 thanks to C’Est Déjà Ca album. Such unusual career path generated a lot of curiosity when follow up Au Ras Des Pâquerettes was released in November 1999.
From late 1985 to 1987 both groups from Toulouse city, Gold and Images, released respectively five and four Top 10 hits and sold over two million single each in the process. They both quickly disappeared from the music scene yet.
A la Dido, the success of Moby wasn’t exactly an out of the blue event. The album Play is likely the only album ever to be an underground hit album spanning four singles over 15 months and then a crossover hit with five singles. In total it got nine singles released over a 30 months period.
No Angel by Dido is the perfect example that music is not enough in order to sell well. Released in June 1999, the album remained completely View More
Since almost three weeks we have been going threw all million selling albums since 2000 in France. Pre-2000 albums will shortly follow, but it is time to stop for a minute in order to summarize all results. On following pages, you will be presented with various rankings of bestselling Studio album, Foreign album, Female album etc. with short comments per section. Obviously, the comprehensive ranking is also presented, containing all 44 million sellers released during our century. Let’s go!
