As it does with many others, anime is somewhat intertwined with the music industry. One of the biggest production outfits in the business, Aniplex, is a subsidiary of Sony Music Japan, whose music labels typically get first dibs at on involvement in a show that Aniplex has greenlit. Even outside of shows with blatant music themes tied into vocal superstars, the relation between a show and its associated singers is an interesting topic for study. Previously, I took a look at how a series’ OP/ED CD sales corresponded to the presence of a visible boost in print source material. This time, I’m going to take a look at the same CD sales data, but compared with disk sales.
Specifically, I’m looking at the week one sales of a series’ first opening single and first ending single, via the myanimelist news board.* That is, when they’re both on sale as individual CDs and not bundled with disks like the openings to the second season of Monogatari were (in such cases, I only counted the one towards the average). If a CD didn’t chart, I put it down as a dash and counted it as a 0. If a CD contained both the opening and ending theme, I put that total as the average. Data for disk averages for each show in 2013 is taken from someanithing. It was pulled a couple weeks ago, and it may be slightly out of date, but should be fairly close to the current values. The analysis can be found here, and is summarized below. Note that I decided to exclude series with episode lengths under 20 minutes from the final sample.
Animetics 