Ouch. Looks like there’s trouble in Don Quijote… With the re release of the Sakura no Hanabiratachi CDS, came lots of bad news. Well, just one, but a big one, the other ones I’ll discuss later.

You all heard me hyping about how cool it was to have a re release of this beautiful song, along with a wonderful story PV that’s pretty moving and sweet. Well, looks like the management of AKB didn’t have such “sweet” intentions about this. Turns out that if you bought the single at the AKB store in Akihabara, you would get a special poster of one of the girls, a random one (with the outfit of the Kouhaku performance. They looked pretty cool anyway…). So far, so good. I mean, we’ve seen this happen in other idol and Jpop groups, so it’s no big deal. Of course, considering how there are 44 possible girls, getting one of the girl you want through the traditional method is a tough deal, but life is like that. Then came the news: AKB would have a Spring Festival. That sounds pretty cool too, a good way to interact with the fans in a closer level, very nice… or at least that’s what we all thought… turns out that the festival didn’t have open tickets, or a raffle or anything. YOU HAD TO BUY ALL OF THE 44 POSTERS TO GET A TICKET FOR THE FESTIVAL.

Wow. This was the point where I was knocked off my feet. Do they really pretend to make this wotas pay 500 bucks to go to the Festival? That’s just… I don’t even know what to say…

Wait, I kind of do. This is just plain abusive. Now, in case ANY of you had any doubts left that AKB is for the fans, you just won’t think like that anymore, right? And that puzzles me, because even though I assumed that they were ok with their fans, and loved them/interacted with them/whatever, this shameless wallet squeezing is clearly aimed for the extreme wotas. Let’s face it, if you’re a casual fan, you won’t shell out $500 to see them in person or whatever. But this didn’t seem like a good strategy to me, because they lose to the younger fanbase. How can you appeal to “ordinary” (non-wota) people when you do things that encourage the obssesive fanboy-ism? And in AKBs case, this can be a bad thing.

Or maybe I’m just looking at part of the picture? And they just decided that the casual fans won’t give up all of their money for the group, so screw them and let’s go with just the super ultra wotas?

Anyway, the thing is, japanese government itself cancelled the Festival, because they deemed it illegal to do that, it was against the Antimonopoly Act, so it had to be shut down. Ouch again. This isn’t a good turn of events. God knows I adore this group, but getting labeled as this is just plain bad. And unfair for the girls who are part of it too, as they aren’t guilty at all for the greed of the management (and I’m ready to bet that Akimoto Yasushi’s as well…)

So this just leaves lots of queston marks in my head. WTH is going on with my favorite group? Only recently I found out that tickets for the daily shows aren’t going to be sold at the theater everyday, like it’s been so far, but they are going to go through a lottery thing. Apparently, you send your e-mail adress, and they do some sort of mail drawing, so if yours was chosen, Good Luck! Now you probably get to have your seat go through another lottery system to finally know which row you can stand in, when you finally enter the theater. (I’m not sure if the seats are going to be assigned this way now, but AFAIK, nobody has said anything about it being any different with the new system. I guess we’ll just have to wait until March 1 to really see what’s going to happen…) I don’t know about you guys, but this just screams “UNFAIR” to me. Deciding based on sheer luck who gets to enter a concert and who doesn’t is a pretty crappy thing to do, and I find it almost disrespectful to the fans, who always lined up like at 4:00 am, because they loved this girls, and would do whatever was in their hands in order to see them. Of course, what I just wrote is what suddenly dawned on the management’s greedy brains: If they’ll do anything, then let’s have them do ANYTHING (and give up all of their money in the process)

I said earlier that I found it disrespectful, but it’s just for lack of a better word. I feel like the choices they are making are taking the group to a place where they will have a LOT of trouble getting out of. I mean, they are turning it into a group for freaks (it’s figurative speaking, I don’t mean to offend anyone by the use of this term, as I’m a pretty hardcore fan myself…), where casual fans just aren’t in the picture, because they aren’t willing to put themselves to the trouble of spending lots of money or crossing their fingers to get their email drawn in the lottery thing, so they will just lose interest really quickly.

Of course, I’m probably underestimating Akimoto, and we may be seeing JUST the tip of the Iceberg. Perhaps they’ll be going into nation wide tours with open tickets for the casual fans? Or they have some sort of side strategy to lure new audiences and hold on to the die-hard fans using the Stage Performances for it? The TV show seems to cater to all sorts of people, and it’s interesting enough to hook non-fans, or at least to pique their curiosity, so chances are that there are really 2 sides of the coin, and right now we’re just being shown one of them. That’s all I can come up with, because it seems pretty pointless to create a TV show, appear at Kouhaku, send members to all popular music or variety TV shows, if you’re just counting on a rather limited fanbase of people who would buy 44 copies of a CDS anyway just because they are obsessed enough with the group, Spring Festival or not.

I really don’t know what to make out of all this. I just hope that the girls won’t have to pay for their stupid management, like we’ve seen in H!P so many times… I will still support them as much as I can, no matter what, because I know that they are great at what they do, which is, being idols, and great entertainers, and I’m only crossing my fingers so that people don’t go into a wave of hatred towards them as a group because of this Festival crap. I have faith in Akimoto, though. I’m almost sure that he’s not stupid enough to cater exclusively to the wota fanbase if he has a chance of making the group even bigger with a larger and more diverse fanbase, and it seemed to be working so far! They are doing well on Oricon and everything… please… let this not be screwed up, we already have H!P for scandals…