Abroad
Planet Québec
With an enthusiastic but limited domestic market, Québec artists often rely on the rest of the world for marketing their art. They are known and appreciated around the globe in many disciplines and sometimes become so famous that they are instantly recognized by the general public.
Major Québec success stories abroad:
- Céline Dion has sold tens of millions of albums. For almost two decades, she has been one of the world’s best-known popular singers and has broken many CD and concert ticket sales records
- Cirque du Soleilemploys thousands of artists and artisans for its tours and permanent shows around the world, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It has almost become synonymous with the word “circus.”
- The rock opera Starmania, created in 1978 by Québec lyricist Luc Plamondon and French composer Michel Berger, has been performed repeatedly throughout the French-speaking world over the past 30 years. It is the most attended show (at least 3.5 million admissions) and one of the bestselling albums of all time in Canada (more than 2.2 million albums sold, and that’s just counting the original version released in 1979).
- Arcade Fire, the alternative rock band from Montréal, has garnered praise from such legendary figures as David Bowie and U2. The group has won numerous awards, performed in over 20 countries and sold more than two million albums to date.
In addition to these individual success stories, Québec musicians, singers, actors, stage and film directors, visual and multimedia artists can be found everywhere on the international scene, in French-speaking countries and well beyond.
