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[discussion] How can we estimate a visual kei band's popularity?

Author
inartistic
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meta

A few questions about popularity in visual kei, as inspired by a chat with cultic.


First: for visual bands, which statistics indicate popularity? Obvious ones are “ticket sales × release sales,” but what else matters?

  • Capacity of livehouses at which they play?
  • Capacity of livehouses at which they hold oneman lives?
  • Number of sponsored/oneman lives held?
  • Number of CDs released?
  • Number of tanuki threads?
  • Price of releases at second-hand stores?
  • Length of activity period?
  • etc.

Second: without raw sales data, how can we approximate popularity?

We don't have ticket/release sales, but we do have lots of other data. My hope is to compile/weight that data and automatically assign a rank to each band (as we overseas fans are notoriously bad at judging actual popularity).

Here's what I have so far:

  • Average capacity of livehouses at which the band plays. (Could be improved by weighting sponsored events/oneman lives, but how?)
  • Number of releases (excluding free releases?).
  • Number of releases which vkgy users own. (Anyone with a vkgy account can add releases to their collection to make this stat more accurate!)
  • Number of releases which vkgy users want.

Average livehouse capacity is already pretty promising (see Syndrome vs Cell no.7 vs ΛrlequiΩ (アルルカン)), and will become more accurate as more data is added (let me know if you'd like to contribute). But I think those other statistics could be useful if weighted properly; I'm just not sure how to do it yet.

Before I make some monstrous algorithm that magically gives all of KISAKI's bands an S rank, I'd love to get some input from you guys!


(By the way, VIP supporters got alpha access to the live capacity feature on artist pages, and early access to this discussion in the VIP section.)

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[discussion] How can we estimate a visual kei band's popularity?

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I can help out with live houses capacity info if needed. I noticed a few strange S rank ones while entering some info~

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Ok, great! Hold off for now, because I need to switch it over to a new system. I'll let you know when it's ready!

[discussion] How can we estimate a visual kei band's popularity?

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I really want to try collecting MEJIBRAY data because I'm curious to see what their actual popularity was like in Japan vs Western fan's perception. I remember I saw that their Oricon listings had dipped considerably after their last full album.

Also, not sure if this is a good source to go by but maybe social media followers? I was poking around and was surprised to see someone like ASAGI has just a little under 8k Twitter followers while Takemasa from Kiryu has 35k followers, Kouki from D=OUT with 60k followers and then newcomers like Kizu already have more followers than ASAGI has. Then again there's also other social media platforms like Line, Ameblo and Instagram to consider and also how band dudes use it. Maybe ASAGI just writes a lot of boring shit no one cares about while Takemasa or Kouki are more interesting to follow.

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Followers is a pretty interesting idea! Might even be able to do it automatically 🤔 Will look into that!

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I like the idea of using followers as part for the rating. With this are all social media platforms going to be weighted the same? Perhaps, we could divide social media between Japanese centric(line,ameba,etc) and Foreign centric sites to see the difference in popularity (FB,insta,etc)? Another idea, it there a way to track artist searches through the main search bar? I know its extremely limiting but I would think it would be interesting to see what vk.gy users are interested in. Also I think this would fit in with registered user collections.

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