Pre-sales for IMAX theaters open today, for other cinemas on Thursday, September 3 — when the list of venues will also be announced. Sortir à Paris ↗
Sixty-Five Minutes of Something That Is Not Yet a Record
The event is organized by Pathé Live and lasts 65 minutes. The distributor describes it as "a unique evening, a fleeting experience" and promises visual immersion into new songs — not a screening of music videos, but a conversion of the entire recording into images. Details about the venue, start time, or what exactly the audience will see have not yet been revealed. Pathé Live ↗What is particularly unusual is the sequence. Cinemas have served music as a second stage for years — concert films, tour recordings, documentaries about bands typically come after the album and live off the fact that the audience knows the songs. Here it is reversed: the album first exists as a shared evening in an auditorium and only then as a recording that someone can listen to alone at home.
The Album Title Describes Precisely What Will Happen in the Hall
Égrégore is not a made-up word. It designates a form of collective spirit that is nourished by the energies, thoughts, and intentions of a group — a concept from the esoteric tradition that is used today more figuratively, for something that arises only because enough people think about it at the same time. La Presse ↗As an interpretive framework, that name fits: the album is meant to function first as an experience of a full auditorium and only then as a collection of songs. The cover was photographed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, with whom the singer has collaborated for decades. The album is released under Sony Music, four years after the previous L'Emprise. franceinfo ↗
Why She Can Afford This
Mylène Farmer is the best-selling French female singer ever — over 30 million albums sold. She holds the French record for the number of platinum albums: seven albums, five of which exceeded one million copies sold, including Ainsi soit je… (1988), L'Autre (1991), and Innamoramento (1999).The remaining figures are even more telling. She placed seventeen singles at number one on the French Top 50, eight of them consecutively. And she is the only female singer who has had an album at number one in France in five different decades. franceinfo ↗
That is the foundation that allows for an experiment with sequencing. She has also built her career on the opposite of today's practice: she rarely gives interviews, appears in public rarely, and leaves years of silence between albums. A cinema premiere, in such a regime, is more logical than it might seem — it is another event to wait for.
"Désenchantée" from 1991. A song known even to part of the audience that otherwise does not seek out French music.
Golden Palm in the Video
The album was announced with the single C'est à qui le tour, which came out in late May after an almost four-year hiatus. The video was directed by Julia Ducournau — a director who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2021 for the film Titane.It is interesting how these two met: Farmer sat on the jury that same year under the leadership of Spike Lee, meaning she was among those who gave Ducournau the award. Ducournau is also the third woman to direct her music video — after Carole Denies (2018) and Mélanie Laurent (2023). The five-and-a-half-minute video takes the singer through a tunnel where she meets her double from the older and, at the time of creation, scandalous video Libertine. Nostalgie ↗
The "C'est à qui le tour" music video directed by Julia Ducournau.
Why This Deserves Attention Beyond France
Despite those French numbers, she remained more of a cult name outside the Francophone world than a mainstream pop brand — and that is interesting in itself. In France, she is an institution; elsewhere, people mainly know her from "Désenchantée."But more importantly, there is the distribution move. In the music business today, streaming dominates — according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, it made up 69.6% of global recorded music revenues last year. An album therefore increasingly needs an event to extract it from regular playlist listening: midnight releases, limited vinyl editions, listening parties.
It is not, however, a story about a disappearing format. The same data shows that physical media last year grew by 8% and vinyl by 13.7%, marking its nineteenth consecutive growth. The album is not dying — it is becoming something you buy as an object or an experience. Screening in IMAX format is one of the most striking versions of that same logic: a recording for which you first have to buy a ticket. IFPI ↗
Whether it works can be measured relatively quickly — by how long the pre-sales last, which begin today.
Illustration photo: Mylène Farmer at a concert at Paris La Défense Arena, 2019. Author Boydu90, Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY-SA 4.0.
What hotinfo Is Following
- The list of non-IMAX cinemas joining the premiere is published
- Screenings announced outside France (Pathé Live distributes abroad)
- A documented figure on presale pace — the only running measure of demand
- The album was released on 30 October with no change to the announced plan
