Glad to see she's in the top

glad to see she sells well :)

Yeah, that and they also release 2 concert DVDs each year (as does Ayu). That obviously gives both of them an advantage over most other artists.

wowww congrats to Ayu-chan!!
thanks for sharing the news!

Hard work pays well. :) But having to divide the fame and pay between 48 people sort of makes it lose its perk...

She's only 60K behind them, that's about an Arena Tour release or so. Haha :P

Nah, but does it only count DVDs credited solely to Morning Musume? Cause I know they've had those large Hello! Project concerts as well, so I wonder if they've been credited with those sales as well. Hmm. Haha.

I think you are thinking of AKB48. :) But yeah, obviously its best if its primarily going to one person although I'm sure various people at AVEX get a large cut as well.

The majority of JE and avex acts also release at least 2 DVDs/year. Still if no one was buying their releases they wouldn't be releasing so many of them :)

Well, the pay never goes to only one person anyway xD

Oops, my bad. :P

In terms of JE, I dont know of any act that consistently releases more than 1 DVD a year. (Arashi for example has only released I think 10 DVDs since 1999) Sometimes Johnnys doesnt even release all of the tours of its artists on DVD for whatever reason．

Avex Im sure has some artists that do though, but I wouldnt say it is the norm.

Bottom line, obviously if you release a lot of DVDs you have a better chance of being high on this list; thats not necassarily a bad thing though, I wish more of my favorite artists would release more DVDs like Ayu does. :)

Even though MoMusu has a lot of DVDs, they really don't sell as much as they used to.

Comparing 2009's total DVD sales:
MoMusu Spring 2009 - 13,694
MoMusu Fall 2009 - 13,073

vs.

Ayu AT09 - 86,398
Ayu CDL09-10 - 56,544

I get that they almost have as many individual (live) DVDs as Ayu does but their sales have dipped to the point where they aren't even making a dent in their total sales figure compared to the golden age. Ayu isn't exactly selling 100-120k per DVD, but she's still doing rather well. Hm... now that I think about it, does MoMusu's total include every single V that they've had? Seriously if that's the case, no wonder their total is so high. 20+ live DVDs plus over 40 single V DVDs...

Yeah, Im not sure if the Single Vs count towards that total or not. But yeah, obviously Morning Musume's sales in the past were far superior to today so Ayu will undoubtedly pass them soon unless they experience a renewal in popularity.

woohoo! MoMusu!! this is surprising!

I'm kinda curious to see how ayu's numbers ad upto 2million +.

OK XD You were right, some of them barely release DVD a year. Still I don't think the concert DVDs were the only thing that counts. For some reason I thought they were releasing much more, but now that I think of it they don't have their own countdown concerts but the JE Countdown instead :tired With avex it is different, in 2008 and 2009 Kumi released 3 DVDs ^^ BoA usually has 2 per year (when she's having an actual tour though). Still it's obvious Ayu tours way more than all of them do as her popularity didn't sink fast. Even Namie who has been present for almost 20 years has less DVDs than Ayu O_O

Whoa! Impressive. I didn't know she sold so much either.

Namie's been touring a lot, but her tours last a loooooooonnng time. Like the last two or three tours have been at least 12 months+ in length.

There are probably some numbers we don't know like concert tour 2000, some of her clip collections, and some of her single DVDs [evolution, vogue ~ Far away ~ SEASONS, and so on] but here's what we do know.

A Clips 2 - 89,531
COMPLETE CLIP BOX - 64,323
CDL00-01 - 44,726 [partial total]
DT01 - 132,554
AT02 - 6,583
ST02 - 14,306
COMPLETE LIVE BOX - 72,826
A MUSEUM - 101,294
AT03-04 - 69,829
CDL04-05 - 66,674
AT05 - 86,887
CDL05-06 - 57,405
AT06 - 100,302
AT07 - 75,551
CDL07-08 - 78,215
AT08 - 70,920
PCDL08-09 - 69,120
AT09 - 83,840
CDL09-10 - 56,544

TOTAL: 1,341,430 (missing at least 7 DVDs)

And some fun facts that I had NO IDEA about:
Top 10 Selling Ayu DVDs from Oricon (There are some odd placements like AT06 after AT05 when AT06 sold at least 10-20k more, but it seems accurate considering what we do know. It's odd that there are a lot of missing sales though...)
01. HAMASAKI AYUMI (Video Clip Compilation) - peaked at #2, charted for 60 weeks
02. concert tour 2000 vol. 1 - peaked at #1, charted for 27 weeks
03. CDL00-01 - peaked at #3, charted for 20 weeks
04. concert tour 2000 vol. 2 - peaked at #2, charted for 29 weeks
05. DT01 - peaked at #2 - charted for 10 weeks
06. Tsuki ni shizumu - peaked at #1 - charted for 13 weeks
07. A MUSEUM - peaked at #3 - charted for 34 weeks
08. vogue Far away SEASONS - peaked at #1 - charted for 17 weeks
09. SURREAL - peaked at #3 - charted for 10 weeks
10. M - peaked at #1 - charted for 12 weeks

I'm guessing that most of the missing DVDs sold around 90-150k+ which would put Ayu at around 2 million~ DVDs total.

Edit:
Oh wait, I found a source for some of these! (http://www.musictvprogram.com/corner-ranking-2000.html, http://www.musictvprogram.com/corner-ranking-2001.html)
CDL00-01 - 138,000 (VHS - 48,000)
SURREAL - 93,000 (VHS - 72,000)
M - 91,000
vogue Far away SEASONS - 82,000
concert tour 2000 vol. 2 - 93,000
concert tour 2000 vol. 1 - 99,000
HAMASAKI AYUMI - 104,000

TOTAL: 2,041,430 (DVDs ONLY)

ORICON TOTAL: 2,226,000

It's about 200k off... I think there are a lot of sales missing for the HAMASAKI AYUMI DVD and a few others. I don't think they included VHSes in their total.

^ it's kinda cool her DVD sales remained quite steady after all these years.

It's a good thing, but when you think about how many DVD's she's released, it shouldn't come as a shock.