True Life Seek

When a group like Berryz Koubou or C-ute releases a single, the goal isn’t to make good music but music that will sell. It would be nice for both to be true. It is not always going to happen though. These two groups are on the verge of releasing singles that, based on their own merits, cannot possible sell well. That is just based on the music. People will buy these singles though. They will buy them because they “support” their group.

What a wacky world we live in.

(Programming Note: I had to rush this so it is not as long or reviewed as I’d like it to be. Ah well!)

Ideally, people will only buy entertainment products that are, well, entertaining. If it’s entertaining, it has to be of some quality to the person buying the product. Therefore, as the logic that should good, that which sales is of higher quality than that which does not sell.

If all of that is true, why am I again bringing up the argument that quality does not belong in a discussion with sales. Somewhere along the way, sales became affected by factors that were not the product itself. In reality, promotion of the product, I believe, affects the sales of the product more so than the quality of the product itself.

How can that be? With the right promotion, I could sell a monkey banging on a drum over a recording of Mozart. Furthermore, it’d be even easier to sell the random, disconnected noises of the monkey once people start to buy it. In America, every week, without fail, you will hear “the #1 movie in America” on a commercial for a movie. Whatever movie won last week will almost certainly use that tag line. It is essentially saying, “everyone else bought this, so why haven’t you?”

There is more that makes us buy products that disregards our own personal opinion of whether or not it is good. I believe that everyone has at least one person who they will take recommendations from. Some people like to listen to the famous critics, say a Roger Ebert. It doesn’t need to be a critic or someone famous though. If a friend likes a song and you know that you like similar songs, you may buy this song based on their recommendation. For me, Santos26 (WHOSE BLOG I CHECKED WHILE WRITING THIS AND IS FINALLY BACK) was one of the biggest recommender that I listened to.

Furthermore, we have the “supporting the group” mindset. This is dangerous as it allows quality to degrade rapidly with no consequence. If people will just constantly buy without discrimination, creators will become lazy. Why should they work harder when they don’t have to? This will never change but I really wish it would. It is fine to want your favorite entertainment (whatever it is) to do well and support them, but rewarding them for mediocrity is not the way to do it.

I believe that the latest tracks from Berryz Koubou and C-ute, Dschinghis Khan and Lalala Shiawase no Uta, respectively, are not the greatest songs to come H!P. At the same time, I have a strong suspicion that they both will sell well, C-ute more so than Berryz. Nothing of note has happened to shake the stability of either group in the last few months and, if anything was positive about Kouhaku, they got more exposure by being on Kouhaku than not being on it at all. There’s no reason that these singles won’t match or surpass the latest sales.

Whenever someone tells me Morning Musume is dying, I take this same mindset.

Now, if I had my way… Dschingis Khan is rubbish, I’m not sure what else to say about it. La La La Shiawase no Uta is a failure, why would anyone pay to hear C-ute sing it after it remarkably flopped at Kouhaku. I don’t get Tsunku sometimes. I don’t get what makes him pick these two songs as singles. There lies the problem. If anything, these should be tracks on an album. They are not single material.

But that doesn’t matter, does it?

Posted on February 3rd, 2008 by broomhead. Filed under Articles.
Tags: Airi Suzuki, Berryz Koubou, C-ute, Chinami Tokunaga, Chisato Okai, Erika Umeda, Hello!Project, Idol Theory, Kanna Arihara, Maasa Sudou, Mai Hagiwara, Maimi Yajima, Miyabi Natsuyaki, Momoko Tsugunaga, Risako Sugaya, Saki Nakajima, Saki Shimizu, Yurina Kumai