Girls' Generation leads penetration of Kpop into Japanese market

According to Oricon on February 17th, the year 2011 is the year where Korean artists recorded the highest number of sales in the Japanese music market. Although the overall sales of music singles, albums, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs in Japan has been on the downward trend in the past five consecutive years, the sales of these ‘soft’ music products by Korean artists have hit its highest in history, bringing in revenue of 24.47 billion Yen in 2011.

Last year, Girls’ Generation’s 1st Japanese album ‘Girls’ Generation’ recorded sales revenue of 2.96 billion Yen while Kara’s album ‘Super Girl’ brought in 2.08 billion Yen. In total, the sales revenue of albums by Korean artists in Japan demonstrated an increase of 22.3% compared to the previous year. There has been increase in sales revenue for three consecutive years ever since the review on this area was initiated in 2008.

In addition to that, the annual Japanese market possession ratio of Korean artists has also gone up from 6.0% to 7.8%. With Girls’ Generation and Kara’s advancement to Japan, the market possession ratio has gone up 4.8% since 2009 (3.0%) and the overall sales revenue has gone up 2.3 times from 10.59 billion Yen in 2009.

In the album category in 2011, ‘Girls’ Generation’ recorded an annual sales of 642,000 copies and Kara’s ‘Super Girl’ with 451,000 copies, placing these two albums within the top 10 best selling albums in Japan last year.