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

[SunshineSlayer]

Originally Posted by Trinu

Blame the game, not the player.

Artists have tricked their way intosales for a while.

Nowhere near or close to what AKB does. Multiple album covers don't really increase sales; it just allows fans to choose which they like best. Very few fans of non-idol artists will purchase more than one copy of any release.

And sure, it's true from a business standpoint a sale is a sale is a sale and the record companies don't give a damn if half those sales either end up in the trash or overflowing the shelves of used cd stores.

But that's why now, you simply have to view the oricon ranking as a ranking of physical sales and that's it. It no longer represents an actual ranking of popularity or impact.

In short, Oricon has delegitimized themselves through this. Well, this and counting Exile's "million seller" single, because those sales were BS as well.