Is 48G peaked and now on the downhill?

There seems to be mixed signals. Please discuss.

 

Training new gen members requires a long time and all the super senbatsu members are leaving quickly. While a long term plan is necessary, when you are running out of time, you have no choice left. Luckily, there's no reason to worry unless AKB drops out of NHK Kohaku.

 

Saying its going downhill sounds like it's outright hopeless... id prefer saying that the Hype train has slowed down along with the popular members leaving... and there's no one fully ready to take the reighns once the top level senbatsu graduates...

 

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that the sister groups SKE and NMB don't have updates of any new shows or programs nowadays ? SKE in particular has sort of stagnated in the past year or so. I remember in the past they used to have dramas such as Gakkou no Kaidan and Magical Radio. However, there are no new shows lately. Or is it just that no one updates the SKE news dashboard ?

 

It's genuinely because there aren't any new shows. I think it's because of their recent downfall due to graduations recently

 

Pretty much.
The Tokyo Dome concert was their peak, IMO.

I'm not gonna say that the group started losing popularity because Acchan graduated, but she was smart to leave when she did.

From then on, I feel management tried to make the group bigger than it actually was.
While the SG benefited from this and rode the wave pretty well (from the Budokan Fair to the SSA solo concerts), the whole 48G struggled to sell out the (ridiculously long) Five Dome Tour. Not that the men in suits cared, since the next year we saw more stadium concerts than not.
They probably got a wake-up call at some point, because they haven't tried any more domes nor stadiums since then, except for the SSK and Takamina's graduation (and we know how many freaking resales there were for the AKB concert and the EAST/WEST thing).

I think by 2015 there was no denying that they were not where they once stood.
The SG sales started declining and they turned into farmhouses to help AKB though shaking hands.
AKB's sales have stayed strong, but they are doing 6 days of handshakes (with many more girls) nowadays while they used to do just three before.

So basically their sales have stayed strong because they have an increasing army of girls and every single one of them must have at least a couple hundred fans around Japan.

I get the sense they are somehow retracting and regrouping though.
All the groups (except AKB) might have slowed down their releases significantly, but they have all introduced new gens this year.
Team 8 just got a new TV show in TV Asahi on a timeslot that doesn't make the viewer regret watching it the next day.
STU48 is coming next year.
And so on.

It's not the behaviour of a franchise dying unless they just want to keep up appearances until the end.
The general public might be done with AKB and everything 48-related (overexposure does that to you), but when I see groups like Nogi and Keyaki growing at such speed it makes me think that SKE and NMB's decline has more to do with them than with the fans.

I still think new stages would help the groups enormously.
Not only because the fans would have a reason to go back to the theatre, but also because the girls would be excited about it. I can't imagine how it must feel to be in a group for 6 or 7 years and sing the millionth reenactment of Blue Rose, a song that has been around since the beginning of time.
Hopefully these big gens from AKB and SKE mean they are stacking up for something (secretly hoping NMB and HKT have like 20 tentative KKS hidden somewhere as well).

So yeah, they are not as popular as before, but I think they're still extremely profitable.
With some long-term planning and less "trying hard to make the headlines with surprise announcements", they could get back to form when it comes to public recognition.

The SG have suffered the most from the decline.
HKT seems to be safe for now thanks to Sasshi, but they'll probably go the same route when she graduates.

I think management should push to get them more gigs.
I'm still salty that 365 went to AKB when it could have helped NMB greatly.

I don't know if the local TV stations are just not making any offers to them or they are declining them so the girls have more time for AKB HS or something. I got the sense that SKE's Ebi-series was a success, so dunno what happened there.

 

What 48G neds right now is agency transfer which equals to more outside job leading to more public recognition

 

What AKB need right now is to learn from their mistake and pass the damn ball to the next gen.

Invest in the future, not clingling on to the past.

Each graduating member get a center = 4 month not invested in new gen.

 

It's going downhill for a while already.

There was a post comparing the CM contracts from solo members, it was until 2012-2013 where solo members appeared on the Top 10. From the current lineup, there are barely any new member with a mainstream recognition. And that added with the fact that most of the current girls have no agency and lack of a significant milestone to achieve. Like it was said before: their biggest goal was 2012 at Tokyo Dome. Afterwards, what was the big challenge? People got interested in AKB back then because of the whole idol mania having a revival and because they were a group who was climbing up and came with something unusual like the General Election. Now it feels more like a routine, something taken from granted. Just like the Request Hour, the shuffles, the sister groups saturating the whole market...people are growing tired, the group won't grow any popular, it will remain as something established, yes. But that's it. There is no higher goal at this point.

 

Of course AKB peaked and has declined in the last couple of years but as declines go, it's not too bad, more like a plateau. The idol boom has passed but these trends are cyclical, in a few years people will pine for idols again and AKB will be in a pretty good position to exploit it (as long as they keep on bringing through members like Naachan/Mion/Juri/Komi etc)

There's no comparison between AKB and Momusu circa the mid-2000s, MM didn't so much decline as plummeted from the sky like a stuka divebomber, didn't pull out of the dive and continued on through the earth and ended up in the underworld and have just about managed to pull themselves out of hades lately.

 

Of course they peaked and are down hill.
AKB reached their peak on 2010-2011 thats a fact. After that, 2012, they started down hill little by little. I know some people still believe the "Million sales" are a good sign. But we all know that those "Million sales" are not a reliable popularity measure. Real number or fans its far faaar below that.

Was mentioned already, they are in the same cycle that MM. The only difference, big difference of course, its the propaganda machine or tricks AKB have. The contacts merchant Akimoto have. I mean, Tsunku never had a friend like Shinzo Abe that support his groups or projetcs. And we can add many other friends that granted Akimoto a lot of favors since 2009.

Anyway, down hill or not, if the japanese fans still buying 10 CDs average every single (more in election single) no matter real quality, Akimoto will be happy.

 

It's actually higher, if we are to use Twitter as a gauge.

 

OMG

True though.
The thing is that H!P, even when they were selling 30k per single, must have made some profit, cause it didn't stop them from creating C-ute and all the new groups (ANGERME, Factories, etc.). Sure, they're smaller groups and they kicked out the whole of Elder Club, but still, they persevered and it paid off, IMO.

Anyway, whenever people start shouting DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM around AKB, I like to remember this interview between AkiP and Yuko (from January 2014, after Yuko announced her graduation in Kouhaku).

He himself knows AKB couldn't (and wouldn't) stay as popular as it was in 2011-2012 and that's OK.

 

I honestly think that AKB is slowly going downhill. Not going from 100 to 30 but more of a 100 to 55. There is absolutely no one (pure AKB) that can match with the current "legendary" members. AKB's peak was 2010-2012 and even if we start with the 1st generation, they only got 4.8 years. Even though the 15th generation is getting close to 4 years, none of them has even reached half of what the OG members reached. Some might say that, "oh..it's because of the sister group members or the current senbatsu member s blocking chances" and blah blah blah but let's take Sasshi and Mayuyu. One joined in 2007 and the other joined in 2006. However, both managed to get first within 6 and 8 years respectively. That's with only 2-3 main members graduating. Nowadays, there's tons of room for "new gens" to climb and rank higher but none of them is even close. In a few years, of course, we'll see a "new gen" get first but why? That's because Sasshi, Mayuyu, Yukirin, Sayanee, and etc. are either not joining the SSK or is graduating. What I view as true victory is 2013.

AKB is not dead right now but is heading downwards.

 

I have to, respectively, disagree. Those 2010-2012 years were monsters. It would be virtually impossible to maintain that awesome popularity for an extended period of time. But we really don't know how much money the groups are making and how profitable AKB is in 2016 or how profitable they were in 2013 or 2010 (that is, if you equate popularity with profitability). Those figures will never be made known to any of us. So, this entire thread is pretty much guesswork on everyone's part.

 

Single sales have stayed pretty much the same for the last few years.

I think the sister groups are the ones that are going to start feeling the pain. Next gen AKB members aren't as popular as the huge senbatsu senpai but at least they're still fairly popular. SKE and NMB are being carried by Jurina and Sayaka and after they eventually graduate I don't see those groups having much of a future. There single sales in 2016 are way down compared to previous years. At least HKT still has a lot of young members and their single sales don't seem to be declining (though they were never that high to begin with). It just sucks for NGT as they haven't really done anything and I can't really see that changing. They've been around for the same amount of time as Keyakizaka46 but they have no singles and no shows whereas Keyaki has three shows and their third single is coming out this month.

On the bright side, at least 46G seems to be rising rather than falling.

 

It is because our lord and saviour, the incomparable Maeda-sama, graduated in 2012.

 

As @rka said, the Dome Tour was when the flaws started to show, so to say.

The Sapporo concert didn't sell out, and they even announced there were gonna present a new unit (Tentoumu Chu) and there would be special guests (Acchan).
I guess Hokkaido just doesn't care.

Also, a couple of the Tokyo Dome dates didn't sell out, one of them being Akimoto Sayaka's graduation.

Sure, 2013 was huge.
AKB Fair at Budokan, Nissan Stadium concert and election, the Dome Tour, KFC craze and so on.

Everything looked amazing when it was being announced, and the Budokan concerts are still some of the best the groups have ever done, but looking back... I feel the Dome Tour was a (kinda desperate) attempt of showing off their force.
So Long! was released in that year and it was the first one that almost didn't get to the million in the first week after three years of outstanding growth so I feel like it was a "now or never" situation for management's grandiose plans.

 

For me, the downhill came when Yuko left.

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