[orbitalaspect]

NINKI is an extremely bad prediction of sales. Ayu has had several NINKI ratings that were waaaaay off—I remember NEXT LEVEL was projected as one of Ayu's highest NINKI ratings and it actually garnered her lowest first-week at the time, PQ was also way off, as was MY STORY.

We don't really get all the details about the sample taken - standard error, deviations, sample mean versus population, etc.—, especially as it makes up less than .5% of the actual population. Because of the sample size's relative proportion, it's not large enough to make any inference of buying trends in the coming week. If we wanted even a remote approximation to infer buying trends, Oricon would have to poll at least 4,500 subscribers and ensure the samples from each demographic were independent samples.

NINKI is, at best, just a chart of irrelevant numbers that could easily be outside of any statistically significant range of the population data, and often shows little direct correlation to buying trends.

Bad numbers for Ayu, yes, but they really don't amount to anything.

EDIT: We really should get off the sales hump too. While Ayu is still popular, she isn't like AKB48 anymore. And this project is not supposed to be about getting a #1, it's about celebrating 15 years of music from the highest selling female Japanese artist of all time, something our Empress of J-Pop will be holding for a long, long time from now. And we have awesome, true-to-Ayumi songs too!