AKB48 is now apparently Japan’s best selling female group ever, after Sayonara Crawl’s release took them to nearly 22 million singles sold.
According to Oricon, with a total of 21.85 million singles sold AKB48 is now Japan’s best selling female “artist” ever, beating Ayumi Hamasaki’s record of 21.46 million.
AKB48’s latest single “Sayonara Crawl” also reportedly shipped 1.76 million copies in its first week, another record-breaking performance – beating their previous record of 1.62 million last year with “Manatsu no Sounds Good!”.
Sayonara Crawl in all its glory:
Whilst AKB otaku, the group’s owners and their mysterious backers are all doubtless celebrating this achievement, online there seems not to be much enthusiasm for Japan’s music industry having been reduced to an idol marketing machine, and plenty of controversy over the role their infamous handshaking event tickets and voting system have played in securing such a record:
“Japan has gone mad…”
“It’s a religion.”
“The success of their ticket marketing is amazing really.”
“Of that 1.76 million, 1.7 million probably ended up in the trash.”
“If they were lucky about 50,000 of those discs were actually listened to.”
“This is discs shipped, not necessarily the same thing as discs sold. I thought someone shipped 2 million copies last year actually though…”
“These are handshaking event tickets with bonus CDs, not music singles.”
“Don’t know whether to applaud them for keeping the economy going or condemn them for filling our landfills in the process.”
“They are surely accelerating the destruction of the music industry though…”
“All those singles sold and not a single actual hit song.”
“As long as it isn’t the government buying them. It is legal, just ordinary people buying them after all.”
“AKB must be the only group to keep churning out million selling hit singles nobody has actually ever heard of. If you consider an average of 15 copies sold per fan that would be, in effect, real sales of only 70,000 – that sounds more believable.”
The music is s♥♥t they just want the dick-shake. Get it? Handshake? Dick-Shake?
Ayumi Hamasaki is still no.1 for real sales 😛
2 million copies, heh, the way I see it, 2 million fans wanna get the chance to bang Rino.
wahh, its not 2…but 22 million, 22 MILLIOOOON…
DAMN, 22 MILLION FANS WANNA MATE WITH EM, REALLY!!
Sad indeed.
Its a shame that other records from REAL musicians are now forgotten. What about Mr Children? AKB beat Mr Children recors… that phrase alone its a bad signal on Japan music industry.
But… If the government its really supporting AKB then this will go on, ORICON will protect the group at all cost, even if that means the degradation of Japanese Music Industry.
And yes, the number of real fans are very low. Other asian artist with lowest salles actually have much more real fans than AKB.
Japan… What happened to you?!!!!
“All those singles sold and not a single actual hit song.”
– to think i thought there are only stupid posters in sankaku. Japan it seems, also has it’s fair share of moronic ones.
looks like someone is not tracking of the oricon charts.