[Charts & Rankings] AKB48 surpass Ayu as best selling female Japanese artist

[Diego-kun]

Originally Posted by kendelle

Ayu's A BEST is her highest seller, but that also had 6 cover variants....and almost everything has a CD/CD+DVD/TA Version minimum which artificially inflates stats for everyone. The fact that AKB started in 2005 and took off in 2006 but still took another 11 years to outpace Ayu (even with their million sellers and the A/B/C/D/E/Theater versions of everything) is pretty phenomenal in itself.

Ayu has had albums with different covers but, aside from that, the content was the exactly same. Fans had the choice to choose their favorite cover when purchasing the album and that's it. How many people do you guys think that got 6 different copies of A BEST just to collect the different covers? My bet is 1% at most. ASFXX, LOVEppears, Duty, I am... and RAINBOW sales are huge and they had a single edition with just one cover.

AKB48 and other idol groups release singles with different songs, PV, photobooks, etc for each edition. That's the gimmick. I used to be an AKB48 fan, in fact, I own 26 singles and 4 albums. I bought just one version per single/album mainly because I'm not that wealthy. If you wanna be their number one fan you'll feel the need to buy multiple copies to get all the content. The problem is you will have to spend a lot on CD cabinets to keep them too .