2018年2月27日 - The almost monopoly of AKS

Now that I described the overall market and the global balance of power between the main productions, you can't see everything by staying at such a far level, so in the next few entries, I'm going to focus on each one of the four main productions since 2012: AKS, Up-Front, Stardust and Avex, and so, as the title suggests, for this entry, I'm focusing on AKS.

As we saw in the previous entry, from a "singles sold" point of view, AKS has nearly a monopoly, ranging from 65% - at the peak of the idol boom, that is, if you remember the last entry, at the worst from AKS - to more than 80% of the overall market. And as I'm writing this today, the current figure is 78.16%.

AKS has always been hard to analyse, since new groups have been regularly formed since 2013:
- in 2013, SDN48 disappears and HKT48 emerges,
- in 2016, Keyakizaka46 emerges,
- in 2017, NGT48 emerges,
- in 2018, STU48 emerges,

so that a lot of the growth of AKS comes in fact from these additions. But if we focus on each individual group, there are some interestings things to note.

AKB48

The flagship (48) group. Well, I haven't been closely following the overall idol market for enough time, but what I can pretty confidently say is that their peak was in fact in 2012. But despite their loss of momentum since then, they managed to remarkably stay at a pretty stable level... until 2017, but I think they expected the 2017 clear drop (spoiler: Sakamichi). In terms of sales, it's not a dramatic drop, as some could have imagined.

Year	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
AKB48	1,399,709	1,386,522	1,292,295	1,302,584	1,304,249	1,175,645

SKE48, NMB48 and HKT48

I'm putting these three together because they share a kind of similar fate: a period of growth, then a stabilisation and a sharp decrease. I think that while AKB has managed to keep somewhat stable sales even when they lost momentum, its sister groups have failed to do so when the momentum was turning away from 48 groups and going to Sakamichi. The fact that these sisters automatically appear in AKB singles doesn't help them get their own identity, and that doesn't make things better.

Year	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
SKE48	579,198	614,180	463,695	575,803	334,654	337,353
NMB48	392,427	453,818	455,280	430,552	318,380	315,621
HKT48	-	286,494	310,139	307,611	308,230	218,395

NGT48 and STU48

These two groups are too young to make any reasonable analysis.

Nogizaka46

They are one of the reasons behind a lot of 48 groups drops. The group has steadily increased since 2012, until becoming what it is today: a real challenger of AKB48. From the figures I have, I think that 2018 may be the year of stabilisation for them (but that's really uncertain, so treat that prediction with caution).

Year	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Nogizaka46	234,868	414,211	553,501	668,323	875,209	1,037,419

Keyakizaka46

They're a bit too young to make a complete analysis, but what's certain is that their speed of growth has surpassed anything we've seen before. Since they're still pretty new, I can't really grasp their appeal on the general public, but as time goes, things will become clearer.

Year	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Keyakizaka46	-	-	-	-	443,803	784,513

So tha confirms what I highlighted in the previous post, the overall AKS figure hides two different stories: the drops of 48 groups and the rises of Sakamichi series (plus the creation of more 48 groups).



Finally, I'm adding a piece of information I can't fully analyse yet: as time goes, especially since 2016 or so, 48 groups singles (including AKB) tend to sell for fewer weeks before getting out of the top 50, whereas Sakamichi series singles tend to sell for more weeks. I personally think that this is a sign that the general public is more interested in Sakamichi than in 48 family, but I wouldn't put money on it.