This week is a little different. First we take a look at something that’s normally way outside the purview of this newsletter: a Shonen Jump manga, before coming back yet again to vtubers. More specifically we’ll dig into the effects COVID and quarantine has had on accelerating the vtuber explosion.
I know Demon Slayer is popular, but this is insane.
That’s what I told myself when I saw those insane FY 2020 manga sales numbers from Oricon. Not only has Demon Slayer broken a ton of sales records, it broke them in record time, reaching 120 million lifetime sales in four years. For reference, it took Bleach 15 years to get there. I don’t really buy the dime-a-dozen takes you can find on any given webforum right now that run along the lines of, “yeah it’s just really popular.”
So with that in mind I dug into those Oricon numbers to try and answer a few questions:
When exactly did the explosion in sales start?
How does 2020 compare to 2019?
What are some of the outside factors that could have contributed?
I was able to stitch together a simple timeline:
The thing that jumped out to me first was the mindboggling 583% year-on-year (2020 vs. 2029) growth of Demon Slayer sales. To put that into perspective, 82 million is more volumes sold than the entire top 10 of 2019 (which includes Demon Slayer) combined. I’ve never had the privilege to actually sell manga, but in my experience you don’t get this kind of year-on-year growth in most any industry without some kind of huge exogenous shock. And, looking at the course of events aggregated into a single timeline, it’s obvious there were at least a few:
COVID
The big fat mask-wearing elephant in the room. There was a two-month long closure of Japanese schools announced in February and an official state of emergency declared much later in April, just around the same time things were getting apocalyptic over the Pacific in the United States.
It just so happens that the timing of the Japanese government’s first (and belated) meaningful COVID response coincided with a huge spike in Demon Slayer manga sales -- 45.2 million volumes in the first half of FY 2020 alone compared with 12 million is all of 2019. While the seriousness and extent of Japan’s COVID countermeasures have been called into question, it seems highly unlikely that that two-month school shutdown didn’t play a part, nor the fact that the already-popular TV anime adaptation had ended five months prior.
Ufotable magic
As some have already noted, the Demon Slayer brand got a huge boost from its 2019 anime adaptation by ufotable. For those who are unfamiliar, ufotable is the studio that animated various Type-Moon cult classics like Fate Unlimited Blade Works and Garden of Sinners and garnered a reputation for well-choreographed, well-animated TV anime.
The Song of Ice and Fire Effect
Perhaps more important than the simple material quality of the Demon Slayer anime is the way it was released. Whether by happenstance or deliberate planning, there was more than a year between the conclusion of the TV anime in September 2019 and the release of the feature film in October 2020, which itself became a record-breaking hit.
This is really similar to the lift George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels enjoyed in the wake of HBO’s miniseries adaptation. Before the series’ start in 2011, Martin’s book sales stood at around 12 million. By 2018 he had come close to 90 million copies sold. It was clear that in the long gaps between seasons of the TV show (lavishly and expensively produced) people were swarming onto the novels to catch up and find out what happens next.
Shueisha also made the ingenious move of making the movie a direct sequel, covering an entire plot arc after where the TV anime left off, as opposed to a standalone side story. You might think that this would lead to cannibalization of movie ticket sales as tons of people who would’ve seen the movie would decide against it since they’d already gotten up to speed by reading the manga. That doesn’t seem to be the case, however, as the Demon Slayer movie went on to break a bunch of sales records itself. It makes perfect sense, as the aforementioned ufotable effect makes it so that there’s still a big incentive in seeing your favorite scenes animated by them, thereby allowing the manga and animation properties to synergize and drive one another without cannibalizing each others’ sales.
The steady inexorable decline of One Piece
One lesson I’ve picked up from sitting through many a marketing meeting is to never underestimate the power of all of your competition simultaneously shitting the bed, withdrawing from the market, and letting another competitor win everything by mere virtue of being the only one left standing.
If you look at the graphic above you’ll see that One Piece was the big dog of tankubon sales in 2018, as it had been in years prior. What you might have missed is that its sales actually decreased 23% year-on-year in 2020. That’s remarkable considering most of the other titles in the Oricon top ten either remained flat or increased total sales marginally vs. 2019. While I’m not sure what exactly drove that precipitous decline in 2020, fan sentiment about the direction of the series has gotten increasingly mixed during the 2010s, with some contending that it’s been on a general decline ever since the timeskip following the end of the Marineford arc in 2010. It could very well be that many of the Japanese people who diligently -- and only -- follow whatever the hottest Shonen Jump series is at any given moment have been feeling said fatigue with One Piece, saw the rising star of Demon Slayer starting near the end of the 2019, hopped onto the newer shinier ship and never looked back.
I won’t deny Demon Slayer must have some unique aspects to its content that contributed to its runaway success. That said COVID, clever anime release scheduling by Shueisha, and the concurrent decline of fellow Shonen Jump giant One Piece all fired off at once to make 2020 the perfect storm for what was already a huge success.
Virtual YouTubers in the Age of Quarantine
Slayers of demons aren’t the only business that’s been growing in the time of COVID. Vtubers have also gotten a considerable boost not just in terms of the viewership, but content creators too.
According to an excellent survey by researcher Ludmila Bredikhina and independent vtuber Nem, the number of people who began using virtual avatars after COVID increased 24.7%, while those who actually began broadcasting as virtual Youtubers increased by 38.9%.
This isn’t particularly surprising, but it’s interesting to see solid data begin to trickle in to support the hypothesis. When many people are trapped in their houses with drastically fewer entertainment options it’s only natural that they’ll be a ripe potential audience for this emergent new format of strange anime-esque characters playing video games, singing and dancing, or belittling you live on the internet. The same thing could be said for more people trying to get in on the content creation side, if only for novelty value and not necessarily to try and establish a business. (a point supported in Bredikhina and Nem’s survey results)
Effects of the quarantine-adjacent boom can be seen on the business side too though. The timing couldn’t have been better for the September launch of Cover’s Hololive EN brand, whose members have seen some of the fastest growth in vtuber history. Nijisanji recently resumed auditions for its belated English imprint as well. Around the same Q4 timeframe VShojo, an American vtuber agency, has entered the market with a first generation of vtubers that includes some of the most established and successful independent English-language performers like Projekt Melody, Ironmouse, and Nyanners.
Strike while the iron’s hot.
Track of the Week
FM Skyline - sacrifice of saint dell
Built around a hypnotic syncopated percussion loop and ghostly shakuhachi melody, this is one of my favorites off FM Skyline’s incredible PC98 adventure game soundtrack-esque Advanced Memory Suite album.