AKB48 fans go wild, bulk buy CDs (again) for election votes
This time it’s not fake.
After blogging a few days ago about the obviously fake “fan” who claimed to have spent $310,000 on AKB48 CDs, the internet has responded.
Now the real stuff is here, a deluge of cringing photos of boxes and piles of actual AKB48 CDs.
The fans buy bulk loads of CDs in order to extract the “votes” you can get from each CD. These can then be used in the “election”, which is currently happening (and which Rino Sashihara looks set to win again, despite not even being a member of AKB48 any more).
This practice is encouraged by the AKB48 money men, who of course see large profits to be made from such consumer obsessions.
Normally with a competition you say something like “may the best man or woman win”… but in this case, it’s more may the girl with the most obsessive fans (with deep pockets) win!
Still, if we are worried about the sanity of these AKB48 fans, there are apparently even more crazy (and homicidal) ones out there.
1 Comment
Why do the managers bother to make CDs in the first place? Why not just charge the fans a fee for downloading the songs, like iTunes, but just the same songs over and over to rack up election votes? They will make more money off the fans who would be obsessively clicking on their computers or phones all day.