2018年2月26日 - The idol boom and its end

Everything here is pretty expected, but i'm surprised to see how dependent AKS has become on the sakamichi groups.. If they don't do something fast sakamichi, with only two groups, will make more than 48's 6 groups combined... that's kinda shameful whelp. Also interesting to note that despite the increase in Up front groups, their sales haven't really changed much over the years.. the lack of singles in comparison to 2012 is probably the reason for it.. Thanks for an interesting analysis!

Yeah, as I said, everything is pretty expected, but it shows that what was an impression does reflect on singles sales. I think the fact that AKS is more focusing on Sakamichi and kind of dropping 48 groups (including AKB I'd say) is deliberate. My opinion is that the strategy of AKS is to keep momentum as long as possible by creating new groups. The problem is, the 48 groups concept kind of grew old, so that even the latest additions don't end up selling that well, e.g. STU48 (new thus understandable) and NGT48 (less new thus less understandable) are at striking distance of the first non-AKS group (which is unsurprisingly Morning Musume). They tried to do some things with the 48 groups, but now they think that focusing on the Sakamichi series is easier (again, that's only my hypothesis). They have the momentum right now. Like, the fact that the latest promotional gimmick (the Yoshimotozaka thing) is promoted as part of the Sakamichi series and not the 48 groups tells everything. When the momentum will fade, they'll either return to 48 groups or create a new branch, that's my opinion.

Plus, the number of singles you release in one year doesn't matter here, since the yearly figure is the average of all singles released that year (see the first post for a more detailed explanation). In fact, Up-Front's total has indeed increased (a more than 100% increase in singles) but back then, everyone was increasing the singles sold, so that in comparison to other idol groups, Up-Front has increased their market share, but that's not an exponential increase.

Do you have any data from before 2012? Would be interesting to see the numbers from, say, "Heavy Rotation" forward to see the rise as well. Would it be fair to say that Hello Project was caught in the updraft due to AKB's boom during this time?

Your last chart also shows how much AKS is now depending on sister groups and sakamichi to keep AKB's million weekly sales streak going. It really seems that it has become more important to try to put out as many gimmicks as possible (including adding a Sakamichi song to the AKB single) to get the one million than anything else.

Also, no wonder that UF has been cutting back on singles per year and also trying other release methods recently while other groups in other agencies have been ending... it really seems that there are lean times ahead in the idol world, like during MM's Platinum era.

Sadly, no. Retracing sales figures from previous years is much harder than keeping track of the Oricon ranking, that's one reason. The other reason is that there isn't much to compare with: there were only 47 groups in the 2012 ranking and only 21 above 10,000 single copies on average.

If you could give me a link to all weekly Oricon rankings (and the figures, of course!) of years before 2012, I'll do my best to add them in the spreadsheet and I'll probably post something about it.

I don't think we'll see times as dark for idols as we've seen in the mid-2000, as the now three main productions are still there (AKS, Up-Front and Stardust), but for the smaller productions and the smaller groups in general, yeah, I think things will get a bit harder in the years to come.

The two rankings don't have the same goal (counting the number of singles sold vs counting the "popularity", in a sense, of a musical act), also, they don't count the singles the same way, they're not using the same stores etc. So yeah, I know, the change in the rules of Oricon adds a huge grain of salt in my analysis, but changing rankings would be worse I think.

One of the reasons why I'm so confident the numbers would decrease anyway is that numbers are still decreasing a bit, even after September 2016. I'm talking globally and am not focusing on particular productions, which I'm doing on the following blog posts.

^ Really? Aren't you mixing up the "Billboard top Single sales" charts and the "Billboard Top100" one?

nope