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2018年2月26日 - Idol single sales spreadsheet

Posted by keaine, 26 February 2018 · 775 views

I made a spreadsheet listing each single released by idol groups and kept the number of copies sold by each. I'm going to make a lot of analyses from this spreadsheet so I'm giving details on how it's done.

I'm keeping this spreadsheet since 2012 I think, so I have all idol singles released after January 1st 2012, and to this day. The sheet with all the singles has more than 1,000 entries so yeah, there's been a lot of idol things these past 6 years. I'm collecting the figures from the single weekly Oricon ranking (well, the Billboard wasn't really a thing in 2012), and I'm only getting the top 50 each time (because I didn't subscribe to Oricon). That means I can't get the most indies idol groups who don't sell very much, and usually, I get idols groups who sell more than 1,000 singles on the week. For a given single, I'm putting the figures until the single is out of the top 50, and even if the single comes back after that, I completely forget about it (that's already a lot of work, I have to stop somewhere). That's why my figures aren't the total figures you could have for a given single, but I think it doesn't change things too much. I've grouped groups into "productions", that is idol groups who are produced by the same people, for example AKS, Up-Front, Stardust, Avex etc.

My definition of an idol group is: a group who claims to be an idol group, or at least, a group globally recognized as an idol group. For example, Perfume, Scandal aren't in my spreadsheet, as well as Tokyo Girls' Style after they "graduated" from the idol group status.

There are two important rankings in my spreadsheet: the first one is the latest single ranking, in which I'm listing the figures of only the first week of the latest single of a group (if it's been released in the last 52 weeks, which means groups who haven't released a single for a year are out of the ranking), the second one is the annual ranking, in which I'm doing the average of the number of copies sold by all singles released in the last 52 weeks.
That may be a bit confusing, so an example: in the latest single ranking, AKB48 is at 1,095,240, which is the number of copies sold of their latest single "11gatsu no anklet" on its first week, whereas in the annual ranking, the group is at 1,175,644.5, which is the average of:
1,120,494 which is the number of singles sold by 11gatsu no anklet (released on Nov. 22 2017)
1,119,124 which is the number of singles sold by #sukinanda (released on Aug. 30 2017)
1,385,393 which is the number of singles sold by negaigoto no mochigusare (released on May 31 2017)
1,077,567 which is the number of singles sold by shoot sign (released on Mar. 15 2017)
Remember that the figures I give are subject to the limitations I describe in the 2nd paragraph.

I also keep track of yearly ranking, where I'm basically doing the same thing than for the annual ranking, but through given years. All these rankings are also merged into "production" rankings where I add to each production the figures for each group belonging to the production. For example, the AKS figure will be the AKB48 + SKE48 + NMB48 + HKT48 + NGT48 + STU48 + Nogizaka46 + Keyakizaka46 figure (which is huge).

I don't think I have anything to add, so I'll end it here.