Johnny Hallyday, the leather-trousered “French Elvis” who died last year, didn’t believe in resurrection. But from beyond the grave, the musician has managed to miraculously restore life to a dying record and CD industry.

Almost a year after hundreds of thousands of people watched the star’s white coffin escorted down the Champs Élysées in Paris by 700 bikers at his funeral, Hallyday’s posthumous album, Mon Pays C’est L’Amour (My Country is Love), has hit No 1 in the French album charts and become one of the biggest music phenomenons of the year.

With 780,177 copies on CD and vinyl sold since the album’s release last Friday, Hallyday, who died in December aged 74, is expected to have bigger first-week converted sales than Drake, whose Scorpion release was the biggest album in the US this year.

The Hallyday album’s vast sales on CD and vinyl are highly unusual at a time when sales of physical records are falling. Music insiders called it “the Johnny phenomenon”, saying the CD sales were a sign of Hallyday’s huge following in France. Fans apparently wanted to own a physical copy even though it was available on premium streaming services.

The album, a combination of rock, rockabilly and blues, was recorded last year in Los Angeles, months before Hallyday died of lung cancer. It went platinum within minutes of going on sale in France on 19 October and sold 630,000 units in the first three days.

Hallyday, who is seen as a national hero of French rock, had sold more than 110m albums in a career that spanned more than 50 years. “He was a lot more than a singer, he was life,” the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said at his funeral.

The album, which was Hallyday’s 51st, had been backed by a large marketing campaign featuring Harley Davidson-themed shop displays and midnight store openings in France. Hallyday’s record company was so cautious about keeping the album secret before its release that most of the first run of 800,000 CDs and vinyl were made at the same Italian factory – an unusually large order in the streaming era.

Laeticia, Hallyday’s wife and mother of his two younger daughters, said the album had been recorded “in pain, in a fight against illness” but was about resilience and courage.

The musician’s death sparked a bitter inheritance dispute between his two elder children, Laura Smet and David Hallyday, and Laeticia.

The album became part of that fight, with Hallyday’s elder children demanding a right to oversee the record’s production. A court dismissed their request.