Macross Frontier OST Hits No.2 on Daily Oricon Chart
Woah, woah, woah. I can’t remember the last time an anime soundtrack ever sold that well on its first day - the power of Macross is truly mind-boggling. Passing the 10000 index number on its first day, that’s almost unheard of nowadays. With a 1.7 multiplier, that’s roughly 17,500 copies sold in the first 24 hours although for anime the multiplier should be larger, so I predict total weekly sales of around 35-40k… oh hang on. Let me explain what index numbers (circled red above) and multipliers are again. There must be some stats geeks like me around somewhere…
Copied and pasted from one of my Nana posts last year:
The index numbers only represent a percentage of the stores around the country - around 2,200 stores report daily sales figures IIRC. There’s two other groups of stores that factor to total weekly sales - one is a smaller group of 800+ stores who fax in their weekly sales totals, and the other group is the online stores. The index numbers are added up over the week (from Tuesday to Monday) and multiplied with a number (let’s call it the multiplier) - around 1.7 or 1.75, to attain a figure which is quite close to real sales totals.
International and anime-related CDs tend to have completely different (usually higher) multipliers, as cheap imports (for the former) and strong online sales (latter) really make a difference. Which is why Mizuki Nana’s SECRET AMBITION ended up at No.2 eventhough it didn’t rank higher than No.4 on the daily charts throughout the whole week. So remember, if you wanna do your bit for your favourite artist, don’t buy from YesAsia but get stuff from HMV, Amazon, JBook or CDJapan instead - sales from YA don’t contribute to the Oricon chart.
Nyan Furo’s probably gonna drop like a stone over the next few days anyway and surely MINMI’s best collection will outsell it (or I’ll beat myself over the head with a stick), but still… crazy stuff. Anyway, putting it into perspective - last year’s best-selling anime-related original album of any kind was Mizuki Nana’s GREAT ACTIVITY and it only managed an index of 8,692 on its first day.
I don’t know what else to compare Macross to since the anime is in essence, all about the music and less the mechs (unlike something such as Gundam). Erm let’s see…the first Geass OST sold 5,000 copies in its first week…uh, the first Gundam SEED OST managed 14k. It’s probably not fair to compare it to the Evangelion and Macross 7 soundtracks from the mid-90s as CD sales have plummeted since then, but for the record:
Release date*Debut chart position**Total weeks on chart**First week sales**Total Sales**Album name
1995/01/21 **6位 *19週 *21,520 228,840 Macross 7 MUSIC SELECTION FROM GALAXY NETWORK CHART
1995/06/07 **4位 *11週 *84,800 229,430 Macross 7 Let’s Fire!!
1995/12/06 *12位 *22週 *49,650 204,070 NEON GENESIS EVANGELION
1996/02/16 **4位 *15週 *81,620 212,070 NEON GENESIS EVANGELION II
1996/05/22 **1位 *11週 117,190 219,070 NEON GENESIS EVANGELION III
There’s a long way to go before Macross F can match any of that… And oh yes, I forgot to mention that I love Nyan Furo. OST of the year (so far)!
June 4th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Wow, 2nd place. That’s pretty awesome.
See, awesome OST is awesome
June 5th, 2008 at 5:33 am
Amazing numbers!
Why do online sales have such a strong effect for anime CDs in the first place? Does it have to do with peoples’ buying habits?
June 5th, 2008 at 6:22 am
I was more WTF looking at Kat-tun’s numbers: 65445 (with the 1.7 multiplier, around 111k ?!) O_O;; I know they’re popular (although I fail to see how), but still, wow.
Congrats to Macross OST, anyway.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Oh the KAT-TUN figure is no big deal - Johnny’s groups always sell loads in the first week, then disappear faster than Houdini. You should’ve seen the index numbers for EXILE’s last studio album though - it was more than 100,000 on its first day >_> (and sssh, but I have some of their CDs).
It’s definitely buying habits when it comes to anime CDs selling well online, plus in the specialist shops. Don’t think otaku buy their albums in the mainstream stores like HMV & Tower, in fact you’d probably find it hard to find a copy in the swarm of Jpop CDs there. Online = cheaper, plus there’s overseas fans buying them too. I’m also not sure where the specialist shops like Animate, Toranoana etc come into… if they only reported their sales at the end of the week I suppose it’d make sense why the multiplier is often higher.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Lol….so indeed I was doing the right thing supporting my favorite Japanese artistes by buying their albums/singles through Amazon Japan or Cdjapan. XD
It’s not surprising they don’t take Play-Asia’s sale into consideration since PA is a Hong Kong based online shopping site and not Japan. So I guess er…you can’t count that in their local music ranking chart XD.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, the Macross F soundtrack didn’t drop like a rock after the first couple of days. It was just announced as the #3 album for the week with sales of 71,633. I still doubt that it will reach the sales figures of Evangelion or Macross 7, but it’s not out of the question to see this sell 150k overall. Good luck to Kanno & Macross!!