Quote:
Originally Posted by SunshineSlayer
Yeah, these are all good points. There are a lot of artists that sell far more digitally these days than physically. Namie Amuro sold over a million copies of Love Story digitally I believe?
My comment about AKB was less about the influence on jpop musically or image wise, and more about their sales tactics that result in an artificial sales inflation. Bundling CDs with music cards, hand shake tickets, and concert tickets etc. And I don't just mean to single out them, because several artists are guilty of it (that's how Exile Pride apparently sold over a million copies) but AKB imo has been the worst offender. Just compare their sales figures from Oricon to Soundscan, while indeed they are still one of the top sellers, they are no where near the million+ per single that Oricon reports, according to the sound scan numbers (which only counts sales from record stores). Which makes watching stuff like the recent Music Station where they ranked artists overall sales figures and AKB was right up there with Ayu, B'z, Mr. Children etc as one of the best selling artists of all time. Acts like Morning Musume weren't even in the top 25 and I would argue that in their heyday, they were just as prominent of a presence on the J-Pop scene as AKB is now, if not more so. It really makes you do a double take and go what the actual #&%? I can't remember the exact quote, but even the head of Oricon has come out and said something like "at least Arashi's sales are based on genuine popularity...." basically alluding that AKBs were not.
Johnny's isn't all innocent in this either though as I suspect pretty much the entire reason that Oricon doesn't count digital sales is because Johnny's does not release anything digitially.
And all in all, both situations have made the Oricon charts a laughing stock.
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Yeah, Namie did sell like crazy with Love Story. That's why they released another version of it eventually since it was so popular.
Kana Nishino's early singles' digital sales are also a great example. She sold pretty bad at first according to Oricon but digitally she often sold double platinum with a song from a single that only reached Top 30 on Oricon. It really made me wonder why in hell doesn't Oricon just combine sales together? It just doesn't make sense, lol.
As for AKB, I read a article once saying that their sales are 50% lower than what people think. I remember reading that one of their million seller singles actually sold somewhere around 300,000-500,000 copies instead of those 1,7 million sales they get way too easily. That same article also said that many people buys at least 20 copies of each single just to make sure that they'll get the ticket to those events AKB has. If one of the copies has the ticket, rest of those copies are thrown away or taken to the resellers/retailers etc... so that made me think that this damn group isn't really as popular as they seem. I totally agree with that head of Oricon guy. Arashi's popularity may have annoyed me back in the day but at least they never used such extreme gimmicks like AKB has.
And Johnny's should definitely start releasing stuff digitally if that helps Oricon to stop being such a lover of the past times and start combining both physical and digital sales together.

Then everyone would see the actual sales of our fav artists.