Event / Concert Sousenkyo 2013: Ue kara Sashiko (post-event)

I completely agree and understand, even with your agency topics. However, she should try to distance herself - and thats something we won't know about. I'm just ranting ;p

Mass appeal and universal appeal are different though. For me, Acchan has mass appeal while Yuuko is more universal. I agree she never really had the chance to get antis, but she has said she is Mayu's stepping stone - whether Mayu's fans can actually beat Yuko's to get there, now that Yuko announced a rivalry is a different story.

I don't think Paru really has that ambition (well, at least not as strong as say, Mayu or others like WMatsui) - she's a 'my pace' girl. But if she does get a little something extra, it will take her a long way.

Why not? Its not like theres much else going on and next years will certainly be interesting. Will graduates be allowed to enter? Will they keep the candidacy system? Who will graduate? Of course, theres no point getting really into it, but this years election (as a whole, not just who got number 1) surprised a lot of people. Was it a one off or will it be the same next year?

That is not what I meant, nor did I say it. Its fine to come back, but how often do you want to do it? Team Surprise had the majority of fans hopes up, then she was in the election and now the Dome? Personally, I was happy she didn't come back to RH - that was a strong stance and yes, it was sad not to see her there, but people seemed to realise 'she isn't coming back'. Though thats all flipped on its head now. The problem is with bringing graduates back is that it will always be Acchan - she always was the favourite (of both many fans and management). You won't see other girls returning that often, it makes them look far too dependent. But everyone will make exceptions for her. She can do as she pleases but it doesn't mean I have to like someone who's left the group taking up space of someone who is still in the group.

Basically this. Last years election, everyone went crazy for Acchan and Yuuko was standing there awkwardly (though she was happy for her friends support)

tl;dr: Wow, a lot of you took that badly. Sorry for not particularly liking her But I'm done talking about Acchan. Its obvious why they did it (filling seats) but it really doesn't make clear boundaries (though nobody said you have to stop being involved right away or at all). I'm allowed to dislike it and you're allowed to disagree with me, but I'm done.

 

Count me in on this. Actually, I was daydreaming about this year's summer song being an ondo-style song since it fits with the idea of matsuri and all. But then I was like "no way, AKB might do one for a stage (kinda like Tsukimisou) but never for an A-side single" .... oh Sasshi, your win just keeps getting better

 

Quite frankly if they want to have any chance of Sapporo Dome not being an empty seat extravaganza a "surprise" of this proportion was necessary. I've heard that even SMAP and EXILE had trouble selling it out before. Management has gone on record to say that her appearance is a guest appearance. She's not "coming back" at all. It's not unheard of for artists to have other artists play at their concert. I don't see why this has to be any different.

 

^That's a good point, I didn't think of that. Of course Sapporo would be out of the way for many people. And that's why they're announcing 'surprises' ahead of time... well, that's smart of them. I hope they do manage to sell out though. It's AKB and they're still riding a pretty good wave of popularity, so they probably can...

 

Yeah, no worries. I read it but didn't pay too much attention to that, since it made sense for me. I think it was because someone asked him about theater performances during the tour. I'm pretty sure of what I read, but now I'm not sure where, if it was in his G+ or blog or if it was in someone else's G+ or blog.

 

Sasshi is one of Aki-P's choice to replace Acchan and considering Sasshi won. Aki-P might abort Mayuyu as the next center or hype Mayuyu as Aki-P can. so, in the next election. the result might be close between the two of them.

and regarding the 5 dome concert. it should be named 4 Graduation Tour Concert + Acchan and new unit than 5 Dome Concert. this concerts will be an emotional train-wrecked for every fan and members.

 

I think i read it somewhere that Akip once said to Sashi that she cant be the
center (He might consider it now) Sashi was never a center candidate(Am i wrong ?)
She's one of his favorite but i think he never consider her as a next center

 

I wonder if Sasshi can continue with her hetare character after beating all the other girls, or if she will switch to a cinderella one...

 

i never read something like that, please share it with us...
if he really said that, then he is full of lies, after seeing the way he treated her all this years.

 

I think that would be more the total cost of the event without subtracting the income of the tickets and other things they sold.

Moving equipment? You can hire a lot locally, now moving all the costumes that will take some doing.

 

Even with AKB and its sister groups shattering one record after another in cd sales, I just don't see how they can sell out at all these domes... especially if they don't rally up the local fans by giving local groups their proper spotlight. There's just too many dome concerts happening in too many places in too short of a time frame.

If they manage to fill enough seats at each concert to make a profit, then I have to say, hats off to AKS.

 

I can imagine that renting a dome venue alone is very expensive. Add to that the cost of personnel (backstage staff attending the girls, lighting and sound technicians, security, vendors, errand runners, etc), the cost of moving equipment, and probably a million other things I'm forgetting about, and I'm sure the bill is too high for tickets alone to offset the cost. Merchandise, however...

I imagine it's like a movie theater - the theater doesn't really make anything off of tickets. What actually keeps it in the black is concessions - popcorn, soda and candy.

I'd be really interested in knowing just out of curiosity what the actual cost of putting together an AKB dome show is, and how much they lose or make back. I wonder if anyone knows for sure.

 

^I doubt we'll ever know a proper figure

It isn't much, but when I went to Japanese concerts you had to buy a drink. All drinks were 500 yen, which is a rip off (even for water), so that could go into it, but I'm not sure if that would be money to the Dome (I believe its an insurance thing "we kept them hydrated, not our problem") or something each band does themselves.

Merch is a lot. Tomochin, Sayaka and Mariko goods will probably sell out, being their last concerts. If Acchan has goods (doubtful) they'd probably sell out too. (Most onto auctions probably XD)

But I don't doubt there would be debt. Apart from all the staff, they need to make anything they spent on promotions back, they'll have to pay for whoever does the DVDs etc... I don't even wanna think about the logistics

 

It's kind weird to see "concert might not be sold out" talks in AKB thread I have to admit.

btw. HoneyRoastedPeanuts it's not like I want to push you or something, but isn't it time to unlock this: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6029&start=75#p700978
Dome tour talks are off topic in this tread I think.

 

^ Good call for moving the convo to the appropriate thread.

Adding 1 last dome comment. Clearly their only hope of breaking even is to start selling 1500 yen Paruru Shio popcorn again

 

The Acchan news kinda reminds me of an Eminem song from a while back.

Guess who's back, back again? Acchan's back, tell a friend (to go to Sapporo Dome and help us sell the place out)

I think she's as entitled as any other graduated member to return to the stage but I don't think the Dome tour was appropriate. I also don't think it was her decision. She was supposed to make a clean break, and yet every major AKB event that goes on (apart from RH) you see Acchan. Acchan's shadow never leaves AKB.

Having said the above, I expect she'll just make a small appearance and perform her new single/some singles, say some words at the end. I can't see her performing as part of AKB again (eg centering a song like Flying Get or something), but you never know... I think it would be good to see her again temporarily as part of the fold as a one-off but she needs to eventually break away and give the place some fresh air. People will never get over her if she keeps showing her face every couple of months.

Paruru
All I have to say on her for now is that if she is going to be a future centre/consistent front girl of the group she needs to get some public speaking skills fast. You might like her 'salty' character, or the fact she stays silent/is clearly uncomfortable in the public eye, but these two go hand in hand. This kind of thing won't fly when she's going on interviews trying to promote AKB, and it would be ridiculous to rely on Mayuyu/Jurina/Sasshi to do all the talking all the time when she, as the front girl, is the one people want to talk to.

At the rate of recent graduations, she doesn't have a lot of time to get up to speed either.

 

Latest, the official blog posted a few hours ago gives an update on participating members:

Fukuoka Dome
AKB48 regular members + kenkyuusei
SKE48 single senbatsu
NMB48 single senbatsu
HKT48 regular members + kenkyuusei

Sapporo Dome
AKB48 regular members + kenkyuusei
SKE48 single senbatsu
NMB48 single senbatsu
HKT48 single senbatsu
Special Guest: Maeda Atsuko

Kyocera Dome
AKB48 regular members + kenkyuusei
SKE48 single senbatsu
NMB48 regular members + kenkyuusei
HKT48 single senbatsu

Nagoya Dome
AKB48 regular members + kenkyuusei
SKE48 regular members + kenkyuusei
NMB48 single senbatsu
HKT48 single senbatsu

Tokyo Dome
AKB48 regular members + kenkyuusei
SKE48 regular members + kenkyuusei
NMB48 regular members + kenkyuusei
HKT48 regular members + kenkyuusei

http://ameblo.jp/akihabara48/entry-11554364185.html

 

Is it just me or do I spy a distinct lack of sister group members? Apart from the AKB-only concert held recently this is probably the most sister-group lite lineup I've seen in a while.

You even get Acchan back for a day!

 

^Isn't that the standard line-up in an AKB48 Concert? So nothing special.

 

So I _finally_ got around to watching the Sousenkyo results.
The day before the results I was called in to work for the entire weekend, fml.

First of, there weren't many surprising results after the prelims. I expected Sasshi to take the number one spot, Yuko to stay ahead of Mayuyu by a large amount and Yukirin just cruising along behind all the violence in the top 3.

Mariko-sama's graduation announcement If someone would have the guts to announce their graduation during the Sousenkyo it would be her. And she did.

WMatsui crawled up to the monster wall that is Mariko-sama and left the 'weaker' Kami7 members behind them. But still there's a huge gap.

I'm glad Takamina and NyanNyan were able to rank in the top 10 still after their poor positions in the prelims. And Sae is as popular as ever.

Tomochin shouldn't have participated. She gained a couple more votes for sympathy but not enough as people were expecting her too so she got knocked out of the top10, her lowest ranking ever. Way to leave on a low note :/

Paruru and Yuichan forming the forefront of the next generation of AKB48 members. Yui finally got some company from her best friend up there and I expect them to both lead the charge for the next wave of AKB48 popularity when the last of the ori-members are graduating. For this reason also I hope that Yuichan becomes the next Team A captain.

It seems Yuichan brought her friends from Kyoto and tightly grasped their hands, the NMB two top finally ranking in senbatsu. Now all groups have senbatsu members.

I don't know much about SKE, but good for Akari to rank 16th! I might have to check her out and see what all the fuss is about.

Overall I found the election to be quite enjoyable, some great moments and interesting speeches from all the girls, some more positive, others more honest, and yet others who didn't know how to handle their feelings (Paruru and Annin anyone? ). I sincerely hope that next year they leave those commentators out of the live stream though. That was just horrible and added absolutely nothing positive to the broadcast. The G+ messages were fun but unfortunately hard to read or hear.


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And then now for some statistics that I compiled, much like I did for the pre-lims.
The data can be found under the spoiler tag.

There was quite an increase in the amount of votes 1-64, a total of 172%, compared to the 2012 election. Inference from the 33-64 spots tells us that a total of ~220k votes were cast for rank 65, leading up to a grand total of 2.4 million votes. Assuming that during the voting period about 1.8 million singles sold, that means that about 600k votes were cast through online/mobile subscriptions. A quarter of the total amount.

This gives us some perspective on some of the preliminary rankings. Since it's easier to cast an online/mobile vote (they are available straight away and don't need much unpacking) votes will fill up quicker. This is fairly obvious in Sasshi's case, she apparently has many people voting for her with subscriptions, and some other younger members and sister groups. In contrast Takamina and Kojiharu fans, for example, vote more by singles it seems. Could this point to some generation gap in the wota's?

Now as for the individual results, there are 6 girls that had a monster growth of over 300%, denoted in red. Paruru is the highest with 391% of her last year votes. She is the only AKB48 member to pull of this stunt. especially SKE fans seem to boost specific girls as they have three in the 300%+ category and the Shibata Aya case. SKE wota's are scary....

There was no girl who lost votes.

When we look at the senbatsu we can see something very interesting. Positions 2-11 all have more votes than last year, but only barely. After correction for the vote inflation, we see that only Matsui Rena was able to actualize a growth amongst these positions. This can mean several things: these girls lost momentum and have reached their peak popularity and fanbase growth, they have more casual voters than wota voters, and/or they're losing popularity. It would be interesting to see whom of these girls (and also in the other UG/NG/FG groups) will announce their graduation this year.

Now that's she's graduating the Great Shinoda Mariko Wall shall be renamed the Great Kashiwagi Yuki Wall. 15k-20k votes is a large large difference to enter the top5.

The term Kami7 is dead. Long live the Kami7. With Sasshi being the top dog and only 3 out of the original Kami7 in the top7 there is no more Kami7. They were slain. Job well done.


When we look at vote division between categories, groups and teams we see that senbatsu still takes over 50% of all the votes with 56.93%

AKB48 gets over 50% of the votes with 30 ranking members, and therefor remains the largest and most popular of the groups. Relatively speaking they rank second after HKT48 (not counting the 1 member factions) because of Sasshi's huge amount of votes. SKE and NMB have quite a bit of ground to cover before they reach overall popularity levels of the main group.

As for the teams, AKB Team A is by far the most popular team, raking in over 20% of the votes with 11 members ranking. A number only rivaled by AKB Team B, but they get quite a few votes less.
When looking at the teams relatively we see once again that HKT Team H ranks highest due to Sasshi's win. Second, some might say surprisingly, is AKB Team K. They only have 7 members ranking so Yuko's high vote count weighs heavily.
As for SKE, they seem especially well balanced. If the Kenkyuusei would join Team E then there even is a three way tie not only on vote numbers, but also on members ranking. Popularity wise this seems as a perfect redistribution and thus shuffle.
NMB still has their powerhouse in Team N with the other two teams dragging along. And supposedly no interesting Kenkyuusei (or young Team BII members for that matter).

The sister groups have risen, but not as much as some people were claiming. SKE has taken over the Under Girls, but the Senbatsu is still firmly ruled by AKB members. When popular AKB members graduate SKE does have the best position to fill the open senbatsu positions. While HKT is doing well for being the youngest group, NMB still seems to be struggling and is now the least popular group by quite a margin.

Spoiler

http://i.imgur.com/9UMj8bF.jpg