Why like akb48

AKB48 has its own manga series, video games and various sister groups and theaters scattered throughout Japan and Asia. Thanks to that, the idol industry continues to rake in tons of revenue from physical media sales, despite its predominately young and digital-savvy fandom. They have yet to break into the biggest music market — the United States. AKB48 routinely floats to the No. Granted, foreign music is hard to sell — language barriers, cultural differences and bizarre production choices are just some of the reasons for this.

But the rise of K-pop in Western media shows that people are receptive to songs sung in other languages and images of other cultures. AKB48 should be no different then. Since AKB48 has been around for over 15 years, they have both the means and ability to go abroad and have been domestic superstars almost since their debut. Despite ticking all the boxes for global success, AKB48 is tailored to a specific subculture unique to Japan: otaku culture.

Otakus are those who are obsessed with popular culture, from anime to video games to web novels, to the detriment of everything else. Put bluntly, they are the perfect customer base for a group such as AKB48 because they are guaranteed to buy albums, and buy they have. When AKB48's agency released the Minegishi video along with a blog post demoting her to the "training" ranks of the member-strong group, it was only the most extreme example in a long line of similar incidents.

Minami Minegishi just turned 20 years old. That's the age of majority in Japan; two weeks previously, she had celebrated her coming-of-age day along with every other Japanese person who reached the age of 20 in the past year.

As an adult, how is it even possible to be stopped from forming a relationship by your employer? And how can fans accept the ritual humiliation of someone they look up to? To answer that, we have to look at the story of AKB48, and how brilliant marketing and institutional misogyny have exploited pop cultural loopholes for the group to take over Japan.

Make no mistake — taking over Japan is exactly what AKB48 has achieved in recent years. The girl group dominates the charts to a level never seen in countries like the US today; in and , all top five positions in the Oricon rankings Japan's equivalent of the Billboard chart were occupied by AKB48, and the band has sold over 20 million CDs in total.

The group was formed in , taking its name from the Akihabara district of Tokyo "Akiba" for short where various members give performances each day at the dedicated AKB48 Theater. The concept behind the group was to create stars that fans could not only relate to, but actually meet. While the AKB girls are pretty, they aren't portrayed as the aloof, chiseled ice queens often seen in J-pop; they give off a vibe that isn't girl-next-door so much as popstar-next-stage. Even their lack of conventional singing ability is held up as an advantage, as fans get to watch them improve through the years.

Minami Minegishi, for example, joined the group when she was just 13 years old. For all the group's success and ubiquity, they're somehow not quite mainstream — at least, not in the way we'd normally think of the word. And if they were to buy CDs, it's unlikely they'd go for AKB48, who make music that would be considered impossibly juvenile by just about any standard.

Instead, the group has found success by targeting a niche market: the otaku, Japan's unique subculture of nerds and misfits. With its streets of manga stores and maid cafes, Akihabara is the otaku capital of the world, and it's no coincidence that AKB48 was born there. In a declining music industry, producer Yasushi Akimoto worked out how to strike gold: create a group laser-focused on the one demographic guaranteed to hand over money, no matter what.

The otaku proved the perfect fit. Not only did Akimoto make AKB48 appealing enough for people to buy the CDs, he figured out methods of convincing devoted fans to buy the same CD multiple times. Singles often come with lottery tickets to meet members of the group, or — most lucratively — a vote in the annual AKB48 "election," a giant popularity contest that crowns the leader of the group. There's no limit on the number of ballots, meaning fans sometimes buy tens or hundreds of copies of one single in order to help their favorite member to the top; it puts a whole new spin on the phrase "voting with your wallet.

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