K-ON! Image Songs Top Music Charts at #2 & #3

The two image song singles for K-ON!’s Mio Akiyama and Yui Hirasawa, recently released, have rapidly rocketed to the top of the Oricon national music rankings, grabbing the #2 and #3 spots, respectively.

This follows on the heels of the wild success of the show’s three earlier singles, Cagayake! GIRLS and Don’t say “lazy”, as well as the insert song Fuwa Fuwa Time, all of which danced around the Top 6 at various times over the last 2 months, with the first two even claiming the top 2 spots for a period.

The two CDs, the first pair in an apparent K-ON! image song series, have managed impressive sales numbers in their first few days of sale, of approximately 32,881 for Mio’s image CD, and 31,384 for Yui’s.

These figures put them several thousands of units behind the the releases beneath them, but still substantially under the 65,000 figure of the #1 CD, a release by the well-know group V6 (You might remember them as the performers of the 1st Inu-Yasha OP).

Both CDs contain six tracks in total,  with each including 2 unique new image songs from their respective characters, as well as one new song “Let’s Go” that receives both a Yui and Mio version. The extra 3 songs are various instrumental-only versions.

Yui’s two songs are named ギー太に首ったけ / Giita ni Kubittake and “Sunday Siesta”, and the two from Mio are “Heart Goes Boom!!” and “Hello Little Girl”.

Here are samples of the main track from each of the girl’s singles, although they they stand a fair chance of being removed at some point in the future, so be quick:

Heart Goes Boom!!

ギー太に首ったけ / Giita ni Kubittake

Both Mio’s CD and Yui’s CD are now available for international purchase.

Via Yahoo! Japan and Oricon.

Whilst this success is impressive, there have been increasing concerns voiced by chart watchers that Oricon’s sales figures no longer accurately represent the buying habits of music lovers at large, who have increasingly turned to online distribution not well covered by these charts.

This has left them to be increasingly dominated by small but highly devoted groups of consumers, such as otaku Mio-fanatics…