In their declining flop disbanding era, IVE becomes the best selling Girl Group
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Oh I didn’t know they were this good at albums
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Oh I didn’t know they were this good at albums
You must've been new to kpop.
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Wait, didn’t TWICE sell the most albums?
Yes.
This is on Hanteo. That is to say, only sales tracked by Hanteo-certified stores.
On Circle, which tracks distributer shipments, Twice have 15M sales (not including 4.4M Japanese sales)
As compared to Ive's 11.7M sales (not including their ~740K Japanese sales OR the sales of their latest album. add a million or something, idk.)
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Yes.
This is on Hanteo. That is to say, only sales tracked by Hanteo-certified stores.
On Circle, which tracks distributer shipments, Twice have 15M sales (not including 4.4M Japanese sales)
As compared to Ive's 11.7M sales (not including their ~740K Japanese sales OR the sales of their latest album. add a million or something, idk.)
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Most k-pop groups don't do proper Japanese albums? Meaning, fully original Japanese songs, from beginning to end?
I don't know why they don't do it. It has obviously worked for Twice.
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You must've been new to kpop.
to 4th gen yes
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Most k-pop groups don't do proper Japanese albums? Meaning, fully original Japanese songs, from beginning to end?
I don't know why they don't do it. It has obviously worked for Twice.
I feel only certain groups can do that. I assume most aren't popular enough there to put that much effort. I'm shocked that popular kpop groups in Japan like Le Sserafim, IVE, Aespa, Illit, Kep1er , and a few others don't attempt that. I feel they should attempt that with the amount of sales they receive. I guess the only other popular group I can think of is Itzy that provides Japanese fans with proper album releases. I think they get a good amount of sales from that region.
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Most k-pop groups don't do proper Japanese albums? Meaning, fully original Japanese songs, from beginning to end?
I don't know why they don't do it. It has obviously worked for Twice.
It clearly works for Twice since they basically pioneered the J-line in kpop. Misamo alone can sell out Tokyo Dome so of course they put a ton of effort into Japan. Izone probably did the same bc of their strong Japanese fandom. For other groups though, the gap between Korean and Japanese sales is probably huge, so Japanese releases are more like a quick low effort cash grab. The company might think it's not worth pouring too many resources into unless they did it the way Nj did with with their Japanese released.
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Most k-pop groups don't do proper Japanese albums? Meaning, fully original Japanese songs, from beginning to end?
I don't know why they don't do it. It has obviously worked for Twice.
BP never did, but all YGE groups did which is weird imo, but overall I think it's pretty common to have at least 1 proper japanese album in k-pop?
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Most k-pop groups don't do proper Japanese albums? Meaning, fully original Japanese songs, from beginning to end?
I don't know why they don't do it. It has obviously worked for Twice.
Because:
- Most groups realized the sectet: if you are popular in Korea then there is a high chance you'll also be popular in Japan (and China too). The time and resources can spend on something else,
- Japanese sales is in decline. The era of millions sellers girl groups (even local ggs) has gone
Anyway, IVE is still the best selling Korea gg in Orion for 2 consecutive years.
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Because:
- Most groups realized the sectet: if you are popular in Korea then there is a high chance you'll also be popular in Japan (and China too). The time and resources can spend on something else,
- Japanese sales is in decline. The era of millions sellers girl groups (even local ggs) has gone
Anyway, IVE is still the best selling Korea gg in Orion for 2 consecutive years.
This is pretty myopic.
It's not about sales, necessarily. Because while Japanese albums don't sell a lot, there's money to be made in touring and streaming. Especially in touring, much more money than can be had in South Korea. So you need to cultivate that fandom.
Twice are the only kpop girlgroup to do proper Japanese releases* and also happens to be the only one that can do multiple nights at Nissan Stadium. Yes? Like maybe these two things are related?
"Yeah but they have Japanese members"
ok, forget Twice. SNSD and Kara. Neither had Japanese members. Both did increasingly "proper" Japanese releases. Both reached a level of success in Japan that hardly any girlgroups have since.
Now, as for Ive, well, if you factor in streams and think about it in terms of units, we can say that Enemy is platinum certified and Be Alright isn't, despite the latter releasing first. This gulf is only explained by Enemy having significantly more streams (which makes sense: it has two singles which both charted higher) and/or downloads.
And since units are essentially revenue-adjusted, the natural conclusion is that it does, indeed, pay to do it properly in Japan.
*Here I'm disagreeing with Stan I-dle, in that what Itzy are doing is the same thing as what SKZ are doing. Like sure, they may have some high effort songs. But they're releasing EPs, and padding them with "Japanese Version"... versions.. of title tracks. And calling that a full length album. That is not 100% original Japanese work!
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This is pretty myopic.
It's not about sales, necessarily. Because while Japanese albums don't sell a lot, there's money to be made in touring and streaming. Especially in touring, much more money than can be had in South Korea. So you need to cultivate that fandom.
Twice are the only kpop girlgroup to do proper Japanese releases* and also happens to be the only one that can do multiple nights at Nissan Stadium. Yes? Like maybe these two things are related?
"Yeah but they have Japanese members"
ok, forget Twice. SNSD and Kara. Neither had Japanese members. Both did increasingly "proper" Japanese releases. Both reached a level of success in Japan that hardly any girlgroups have since.
Now, as for Ive, well, if you factor in streams and think about it in terms of units, we can say that Enemy is platinum certified and Be Alright isn't, despite the latter releasing first. This gulf is only explained by Enemy having significantly more streams (which makes sense: it has two singles which both charted higher) and/or downloads.
And since units are essentially revenue-adjusted, the natural conclusion is that it does, indeed, pay to do it properly in Japan.
*Here I'm disagreeing with Stan I-dle, in that what Itzy are doing is the same thing as what SKZ are doing. Like sure, they may have some high effort songs. But they're releasing EPs, and padding them with "Japanese Version"... versions.. of title tracks. And calling that a full length album. That is not 100% original Japanese work!
Then the discussion: will it worth the effort?
If they spent 100 resources and already got 8/10 success, will it worth to spend more 100 just to make it 9/10 (because of diminishing returns)? Probably not for many (not all) companies / groups / idols.
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Also RIAJ physical certification doesn't count download or stream, it counts physical shipment from publishing company to stores/distributors (similar to Circle), while Oricon counts number of units went to customers in Japan.
So the reason Be Alright isn't platinum certified is because they didn't produced and shipped enough 250k units to make the cut, but at least 229k went to real customers (very close).
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Wait, didn’t TWICE sell the most albums?
HANTEO sites do not need to prove they have albums to ship, they are known to declare pre-orders without having Albums. This was made clear when one of their affiliates registered over a million TWICE Album Sales which was a "clerical error".
Essentially, it is easy to rig HANTEO Sales than GAON because it involves many Non-Korean Sites that don't need to verify their physical shipments of Orders.
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