Top Hit Single Francophone Artists Since 1976

Below is a ranking of the Top 20 Francophone recording artists in terms of hit singles since 1976. Of course, this is not a competition or popularity contest. All artists have their own unique style, some of whose is more suitable for Top 40 mainstream radio airplay and some of whose is not. The purpose of our posting this is to give Anglophones an idea of some of the more popular Francophone singles artists so that they have somewhere to start in exploring the rich and vast arena of Canada’s Francophone artists and their music.

We used the following method to rank the artists. We first looked at the year-end Top 50 charts from 1976-2011 (which are posted on Montreal radio station CKOI’s website). Note that this chart includes all hits in Québec—from Anglophone, Francophone, and international artists. For every song by a Canadian Francophone artist, we assigned points (51 minus the chart position). So a song that was the 17th biggest of the year would receive 34 points, the #1 song would receive 50 points, #50 would receive 1 point. For each artist, we added up the points from all his songs to get a total.

Keep the following in mind:

• DEBUT does not refer to the recording debut but the first year the artist scored a hit that made the year-end Top 50.
• POINTS were calculated as above. This is the column by which the artists are sorted.
• HITS refers to the number of hit singles that made the year-end Top 50 (they may have had many more radio hits).
• Successful bilingual artists, like Céline Dion and Roch Voisine, have not been included.
• These are only those artists with hits since 1976. We do not have access to year-end charts prior to that year.
• This cannot be interpreted as the most popular modern Francophone artists as there may have been others who, though not scoring big hit singles, had best-selling multi-platinum albums (i.e. album artists).

For a list of hit sinlges by Canadian Francophones by year, check out the CHARTS page above.

RANK	ARTIST	DEBUT	POINTS	HITS
1	Éric Lapointe	1994	484	14
2	Kevin Parent	1995	330	10
3	Daniel Bélanger	1992	318	10
4	Les Cowboys Fringants	2002	304	10
5	Marjo	1987	274	9
6	Jean Leloup	1991	262	8
7	Les Trois Accords	2004	252	8
8	Marie-Mai	2005	248	7
9	Les Colocs	1993	204	7
10	Daniel Lavoie	1979	204	6
11	Paul Piché	1977	188	8
12	France d’Amour	1993	175	8
13	Ariane Moffatt	2002	170	8
14	Laurence Jalbert	1990	157	6
15	Les B.B.	1989	156	7
16	Luc de Larochellière	1988	154	7
17	Kaïn	2004	146	7
18	Garou	1998	137	5
19	Diane Tell	1979	124	4
20	La Chicane	1999	118	3