10.10: No. 1 - 13,155
10.11: No. 3 - 7,836
10.12: No.1 - 6,053
10.13: No.1 - 7,536
10.14: No. 1 - 5,733
Est. weekly sales: 40,313
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DeepRiver
Lol, i remember Hikki's CM. The good old days 
Not to forget ... A Best had 597 Versions and Distance only 1! |
LOL. But true, A BEST had 6 versions (if you wanna get all the booklet covers). Not to mention that you had no idea what cover you would get since it was hidden the sleeve.
And that Distance cm... Just the translucent Distance cover spinning slowly to the center while showing the music videos. Then we heard hikki said, "Utada Hikaru, Dees-tance" (sounds like she's pronouncing it in Japanese way lol). Such a lame cm...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Miduhyo
To be honest, I like how there's not so much in-your-face on-the-streets competition. I get so annoyed seeing one face everywhere I go. I totally understand that they gotta do promotions because promotions=sales, sales=profit but had I been actually living in Japan around that time seeing Ayu's face EVERYWHERE would've annoyed me.
Though I do have to say I find it interesting that even without all that promotion (or at least not as much promotion) Hikki still got huge sales whilst Ayu went on an advertisement media-murdering-marathon and didn't outsell by all that much in technical terms. (to be honest, I don't really remember how much those albums sold at the time. So that last line right there could just be me just throwing swings in the dark, which I usually tend to do when I try to sound smart  Please don't hate on me if I'm absolutely wrong. OTL) |
You're totally right. That was how it drove me into my first turn off towards ayu during that period. Basically she was everywhere in the JPop world. Too much exposure (magazines, tv lives, the fever of DOME TOUR), hectic cd releases (Jan - evolution; Feb - ayu-mi-x III and re-release 8' singles; Mar - NEVER EVER + A BEST; May - Endless sorrow; July - UNITE!; Sep - Dearest + ayu-ro mix 2 + trance; Dec - A song is born), lots of cms (VISEE, Hi-chew, TU-KA). I got saturated by those releases, so I was indifferent when she released I am... I didn't get back to her until she released RAINBOW.
I can't really recall how much promotions did hikki have for Distance. All I can say is that ayu's promotions were far more fabulous than hikki. Even I got excited when she did those countdown cms. Don't forget, hikki was already the queen at that point, and ayu was just rising to the peak. I gotta be fair, they both got benefits from that battle. Hikki secured her "already queen statue". I mean, even without the battle she could still easily get over maybe 3.5 million in the end. But that battle actually showed how strong she was. For ayu, before the battle she was just one of those "most popular singers at that very moment). That battle actually pushed her to the peak (at least that's how I felt during that moment). It's like, "hey ayu can actually compete with hikki. Look how close the sales are." If someone told me that ayu could compete with hikki half a year ago (Sept 2000, when Duty released), I would just laugh. But she proved that she could compete with the queen and eventually became one of the queens.