Everything is AKB: A Convo with Patrick St. Michel
If you're a K-pop fan, or someone interested in the world of K-pop and therefore reading this newsletter, you probably know a bit about the world of J-pop, and likely know the brand name "AKB48," and know that some K-pop acts and companies have taken nods from AKB48. Nothing was as big of a moment as 2018's Produce 48, the third edition of Mnet's Produce series where dozens of K-pop hopefuls would compete (despite the series' ultimately being rigged).
Produce 48, or P48, brought contestants from the Japanese AKB48 girl group and associated acts, and featured them alongside K-pop trainees. The show was fascinating for many reasons, and many popular acts, such as IVE and Le Sserafim, currently feature contestants featured on the show.
P48 was my first real introduction to AKB and all it stands for beyond a handful of songs I knew of, and for years it's been on my mind for how it's impacted K-pop. At the same time, I've been a longtime reader of Japan-based journalist Patrick St. Michel's newsletter, Make Believe Melodies, and kept being intrigued by his ongoing argument that "Everything is AKB," meaning that the entire music industry, or perhaps even the world, is now operating in similar ways to that J-pop act.
To delve a bit deeper into this idea, and how it impacts K-pop, and music in general, I spoke with Patrick and tried to have an in-depth, but still limited in scope, discussion about what it means when Everything is AKB.
This conversation took place several months ago (sorry Patrick!), and I am posting it now because it required an intense editing process after being condensed because it was originally around 25,000 words. There likely are typos, so please comment or email me if you notice anything.
Tamar Herman: Okay, so for starters: the whole basis of this interview is that I noticed ages ago you started saying, "Everything is AKB." I think I remember reading it the 1st time in relation to the Produce series, though I could be wrong. What do you mean when you say that "Everything is AKB"?
Patrick St. Michel: So, "Everything is AKB" is an idea, I suppose. Maybe a lifestyle, maybe a guiding principle of everything I do at this point... I think you're correct in [it] sort of emerged at the time of Produce 101, the Korean survival show that debuted in the early 2010s. That took 101 women participants trying to make a group and did this whole thing that looked very similar to AKB48 stage design. The entire show had a sort of AKB vibe to it.
For anyone who doesn't know AKB48, we probably should back it up.
I gotcha. "Everything is AKB48" refers to the idea that this J-pop group for most of their existence, especially during their sort of peak time in the Japanese market, were sort of overlooked and seen as this oddity on the global pop landscape.The truth is, like a lot of elements of Japanese pop culture and just regular culture, they actually were sort of ahead of their times in seeing where the industry and the way that fans interact with the industry was going. And in the years since, whether it's coming from K-pop, whether it's coming from American pop...Honestly, at this point, coming from every pop industry on the planet, there are elements of what AKB was doing in the early 2010s.
What was once viewed as genuinely weird, and like, "this not normal," have become the norm. We can kind of get into the nitty gritty of that as we go, but the key is AKB48 [they] are sort of the canary in the proverbial pop coal mine of where we are today.
And what is AKB48 for people who have no idea?
So AKB48 is an ongoing group here in Japan that started in 2007, I believe. At least they put out their first songs then. They are part of the long tradition of J-pop idol groups which stretch back all the way to the 1970s, and have sort of gone through different iterations in the decades since.
And what made AKB48 unique when it was first introduced to the Japanese market is they had the overarching idea of - air quotes here - "idols you could meet." And what that meant was, whereas other idols we're kind of seen as superstars... They're people we kind of imagine, that we dream of them. You know there's this distance between us and the performer.
AKB48 would literally be on the streets of their home neighborhood in Tokyo, Akihabara, which is where the AKB comes from, and they'd be kind of like promoting the group. They had a theater in Akihabara, where they would do daily performances which would allow really hardcore fans to sort of go when their favorite member was performing, or even just drop in whenever they wanted to see an idol show in this part of Tokyo that's well known for idols.
They were more, in theory, accessible to fans.
Just as importantly, is the 48 in their name, which refers to the number of members they initially had when the group started. 48 members, which was a big increase from the number of typical members in a J-pop idol group from the years prior. I think a dozen was maybe where you would kind of hit a ceiling. But here they were, just like, “Let's get 48 women together, and then that way there'll be someone for everyone to support.” “Maybe I like this person because their favorite food is ramen.” Or “Oh, I really like the way this girl smiles” or something. It's a way of maximizing reaching potential fans.That's really important. Because AKB48's entire model is built on fandom and sort of making the most out of fans.
Idol music in Japan has waves of mainstream popularity. When AKB48 debuted, it was kind of a low season for idle music. This was a period where rock was really popular. This was when groups like Perfume were kind of moving away from an idol image, and embracing electronic sounds and doing something very fresh and new.
AB48 was very idol idol. Their music's really up tempo. Lots of horns.You have 48 girls singing in unison. So it's this wave of sound that some people will find really cute and upbeat, and other people will find extraordinarily grating, because it's just so much. And it wasn't really designed to be a thing that's gonna appeal to every listener in the country. But they developed a system where fans could support their favorite members, and the group as a whole. That could be by buying tickets to the theater shows, or, more importantly, buying the CD singles that would come out like every three months, and trying to make sure that the group themselves, of course, would go to the top of the charts here in Japan.
But also the master stroke of AKB48 is, since it's such a big ecosystem, is that it initially was 48 girls. But as time went on, it actually expanded to several 100 members. It became not just about making AKB48 the biggest group in Japan: it was about making sure your preferred member was also moving up the ranks of AKB48 at the same time. So the master stroke of the AKB48 model was that for a while they had a yearly “election,” later described as a festival of democracy, where in every year they would release a special single that came with a ballot that allowed you to vote in sort of the AKB48 general election, which was basically the yearly popularity ranking.
"Wakariyasukute Gomen" is performed by Produce 48 Senbatsu, a team featuring some members of AKB48 who appeared on Produce 48.
People could buy as many CD singles as they wanted, thus procuring as many ballots as they wanted for their favorite member. Meaning that wealthier fans, who tend to be older men, would routinely buy multiple copies of CDs to get the ballots. And this was also true of other singles. Non-election singles would come with tickets for handshake events where it's like each ticket gets you… I don't know. Five seconds with your favorite member. But if you just keep buying the CDs you get more and more seconds.
AKB was really good about releasing different versions of their albums and singles, so like one would have different members on the cover, or it would come with a special little trinket inside a trading card or a sticker. But you didn't really know what you'd get inside. You'd have to buy multiple copies it was all about maximizing the fan’s devotion to the group and getting them to sort of overspend, if you will, to really prop up the group on a higher level.
AKB48 had a lot of songs that were popular like with the mainstream. But when you look at their sales they seem really, really, really, like historically popular in a way that doesn't actually match up with their overall prominence in culture.
I don't know. I think “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” is pretty popular still.
There are two AKB48 songs that transcend AKB. “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” is definitely one of them, and the other is actually what I would say is their their mainstream breakout “Heavy Rotation.”
Anyone who hasn't watched the “Heavy Rotation” video… It's a very important document of AKB48. I do just recommend stop reading. Stop engaging with this and just watch it. It will kind of underscore the connection that AKB was trying to build.
The video starts with the viewer, presumably us, looking into a keyhole to spy on AKB48, as they have a sleepover. But they're wearing lingerie. It's wild, and it kind of explains the connection that we're trying to build with fans. You can get all into that. psychoanalyze it however you want. But it underscores how this was real. This was a group focused on mobilizing their fans and getting them to support the group, and the members. More than a regular pop fan traditionally would.
I will say one thing that's important to note is they’re mostly, definitely, male. When I go to a concert, there are definitely women who like AKB. I was an English teacher at the time of AKB’s ascendance, and I do remember lots of junior high school girls really liking AKB. Maybe it was because it was kind of a aspirational thing, which is the same thing that a lot of companies, like the one formerly known as Johnny's, served. AKB offered the same kind of dream or illusion depending how cynical you want to get but.
And this is the important part…Because AKB model emphasizes lots of purchasing and lots of shelling out money. It favored people with more money to blow on all of this stuff, which tended to be middle aged men who, you know, have careers. They have an income that they can draw from to buy their extra CDs to get the ballots. Junior high schoolers got to study. They can't do that. They can buy a single CD and just enjoy it.
Whenever I tell people that the K-pop fans who are the most lucrative ones are at least post grads. Young professionals, if not older. People are like, “what do you mean?” And I'm always like, “No, the audience that they need and rely on is obviously people who have money, who have spendable money.” And even they complain because there's too much money demanded for this love. But it's just always so funny to me that people are shocked. Who do you think is paying for this? It's not like if I was 14, or even younger, and went to my parents and was like, “I want to buy 10 albums to support my faves.” My parents would literally be like, “No.”
Well, not just 10 albums, 10 of the same album.
I'm sure some kids do, and I'm sure some parents do that, but honestly it has always surprised me how surprised people are that there is money involved in these fan relationships.
That gets sort of the interesting points about AKB back then, which has actually sort of carried on into modern times globally. I remember one of the big things with English media, especially English media, was that people loved to kind of gawk at AKB. Sometimes rightfully, but sometimes it's a little bit more present like, “Here’s Weird Japan. Look out.”
This is another thing we can get into. It's that angle that makes me very adamant about the AKB Is Everything line of thinking. Every year there would be a viral story in Japan around the time of the [ AKB48] election single about authorities discovering a box of CDs abandoned in a park, or like 5 boxes of unopened CDs left on top of a mountain. In smaller ways too. I actually remember when I moved to the neighborhood I live in, in Tokyo. This was 2016, or 2017, I remember, like a week within a week of being here walking home, and someone had put out an entire box of the latest AKB48 single, with a sign in Japanese that said, “Please take as many as you want.” And I took one.
But this is a big part of it: the people with money would be literally kind of bulk, buying in a way to either prop up the group as a whole, or procure the ticket, or the ballot, or whatever came with it, so that they would have more of a connection and a more of a chance to support their favorites. So that story to me. those kinds of stories, the sort of “someone has abandoned like a crate of “Fortune Cookie” albums on Mount Fuji, or whatever, to me really underlines how important the money aspect was. Cause like, yeah, like, even if a teenager wants to buy 5 copies to support their favorite they’re never gonna have the capital or income to get a big old box of these CDs and chuck them away.
There was just a viral story in Korea about Seventeen albums the same way [actually thrown out in Japan], and this is not surprising to me. I know people who have bought hundreds, if not thousands, of albums, and there’s a way to get albums to the US and get albums from Korean ordered to you. But somebody I know told me that she actually just tells them, “Don't ship it to me. You can do whatever you want with those albums, just send me my signed one.”
Oh, my! Well, see, this is building towards truly why I think everything is AKB. AKB used to be looked at as this weird group that was tricking men to buy boxes of CDs. The truth is, they were very aware that what was happening was fandom was becoming central to the way we interact with Pop, especially in very new form of… I don't know if privileged is the right word, but at least upper economic powered fandom slash Internet fandom that allowed it.
And people aren't having families, so have more money to spend on hobbies.
Talk about another issue that Japan was out in front of. That's now a global concern. Another story that, in like 2011, was “Look how weird Japan is! They're not having kids anymore. Is it because they're listening to AKB48?” And anime. These are really cliche things, where it's like, “Oh, the men have the fantasy women.” There my be some truth to that, but then you jump to 2024, and it's like, Oh, cool. That's the entire world now. Nobody's having families. And like, are we gonna blame… I don't know. Are we gonna blame Olivia Rodrigo?
Okay, so it's funny you mentioned Olivia of all people, because she now does trading cards at her concerts. And I'm like, Oh, she's on the PC [photocard] train. And just today, I saw that one of the Japanese fashion shows have literal photo card holders as part of their outfits. And photo cards I feel like I definitely associate that with the album bulk buying thing. I remember when they weren't in albums. And I remember when they were in albums, and now everyone’s spending so much money on pieces of paper. I love this for you. I still don't get it, but I love it for you.
But these evil geniuses in some boardroom somewhere... I hope they have a lot of money in their accounts, and didn’t steal it from some intern like the Spotify end of the year thing. I hope it wasn't some intern into trading cards or baseball cards. I hope whoever invented photocards is making bank.
Oh, well, the founder most certainly is. Akimoto Yasushi! He actually invented the sort of proto AKB48 in the eighties called Onyanko Club, which was basically an eighties version of AKB. Much smaller, but 15, 16 women. They would always be on TV. They would kind of do a similar kind of squeaky, clean image. That's a whole other thing… But yeah, kind of selling the same fantasy. And then he kind of perfected it for the 21st century with AKB.
AKB48 was the sort of masterful group of that, and I think especially in the mid 2010s, you saw the most extreme version of that bulk buying. And, of course, the election thing itself is so fascinating. I truly miss the AKB48 election. And to me that kind of brings me to a weird thing, which is that AKB48 is actually not that prominent in J-pop anymore but their influence lingers on strong.
But yeah, the election itself really generated this crazy demand. Not even just in Japan, but you started getting this sort of prognostication going on before it. And you'd be kind of like, okay, so what are the Chinese fans going to do? Because then Chinese fans would be buying more bulk copies and getting proxy voters. Incredible stuff also happened with Produce 101, which is why it’s so AKB.
I never knew. I knew that generally, yeah, there's an election. And then, when there was the Produce 48 era election that was dramatic, but just generally I was just in awe of the fandom only ever was aware of from the periphery because I wasn’t engaging with AKB often. But when it came to Produce, the AKB girls, who was popular? How were they popular? It was new to me in every way. Like how is Sakura so popular, but at the time she wasn’t even in AKB but in HKT48? I still have a lot of questions.
Oh, man. Folks, get get some coffee. This is gonna be. This is a long one.
You don't have to explain all of it. I was just kind of shocked at the fervor and like… Honestly, I was seeing this and I know not only perverted old men like AKB like people like to stereotype. I know there's a bigger fandom, but I was still shocked by how engaged overseas, English-speaking fans were for something that in my head took place predominantly in Japan for local Japanese audiences. And they were super on it!
Produce deserves so many deep dives. I won’t derail this completely with produce talk, cause I could with the modern state of J-pop. [But] AKB48 had its heyday, and then they, kind of like all pop groups, eventually weren't the most popular anymore. Sales can still be strong. They'll still top the Oricon Chart here in Japan. Oricon really weighs physical sales strongly. They actually now count online streams and stuff which for a long time was an impossibility.
That's major.
So AKB 48 still has lots of die hard fans.But you know most people have left. Most of the big names have either gone on to become other [sort of] performers in the Japanese entertainment industry. Stuff like Produce 48 did reveal to a lot of people in the groups, in AKB48, that like, “If I can go to Korea I can end up like Sakura. I can end up in a group. And maybe that group will actually have a bigger global thing going for it rather than the kind of ultimately inward looking nature of AKB48.
But tons of groups still do this. The quote unquote official rivals of AKB48, Nogizaka46 and their associated 46 acts have kind of taken their place as the female idol zeitgeist group, and they do this as well. Of course, boy groups have been doing it more and more, especially ones that aren't associated with Starto, which is what we now call the company formerly known as Johnny's and Associates.
But most importantly, and I think this thing you have touched on, which is K-pop. The K-pop industry has embraced this model even more in recent years, with the knowledge that Japan is one of their strongest markets overall. They really lean into it here as well. I remember once actually walking home in Shibuya, walking to the station and passing Tower Records which, of course, still exist here. And it was the day that a Twice single had come out, and there were a dozen youngerish men outside, surrounded by boxes of these singles. They were live streaming themselves, opening them and pulling out the cards that were inside, the trading cards. And I was just like, Oh, it's truly transcended. This used to just be an AKB thing.
Besides the election, giving away handshake tickets were also a really big thing that became almost common across all J-Pop. Like even non J-pop artist handshake events. These are, of course, where fans buy a special ticket and get to shake the hand of their favorite artist for five seconds, and maybe less. That's always been a part of Japanese music, but idols really kind of perfected it and elevated it in a way, and everyone does it now, which is very funny.
And I think K-pop learned a lot from that as well, though I do also want to talk about, you know, how K-pop and J-pop have a long historical connection, as the countries of Japan and Korea do. And we don't have to get into that. This is not the podcast for that.
But something with the “Everything is AKB” theory that I think is important is that it has become just as commonplace in Western Pop. There have been varying degrees of this practice even since, like 2012 or 2013: there used to be a boom in the quote unquote deluxe album market, which was like Lady Gaga re-releasing the same album, but with like 3 extra songs, and like a remix. That to me was very like, oh, they're trying to game digital sales, which was very critical. But that's kind of doing something extra to increase your visibility and presumed popularity.
Is doing something extra to increase your popularity and visibility at the end of the day what “Everything is AKB” kind of means?
Yes, when it boils down to the core. The thing that was propping AKB48 up and turning them into something that was more than just the most popular idols in Japan, but into the bestselling female artist in Japanese music history was this fandom that was sort of. I suppose, inflating [sales]. It depends how you view fandom. And this is an argument I've seen with K. Pop a lot where it's like, oh, but it shows the love the fans have. So really, who are we to judge?
But it does lead to this weird disruption. Because of this, the charts in Japan became useless for 5 years, because it was only AKB. It was like everything for a while was selling over a million copies in the first week. These were songs that truly did not have the feeling of a million sellerin the way that, like in the nineties, a group like Morning Musume, a sort of proto AKB, their songs were everywhere. That was a defining part of growing up in Heisei Japan, as you would hear “Love Machine” in a mall. But AKB, every song was a million seller, which, as a result, doesn't make many of them special. And it's only the ones that had something else to it that felt like the actual mainstream hit.
Because of this. It kind of warps the way people see mainstream music. And I think I think this is now just the standard globally. It's not about reaching the widest audience necessarily. It's about finding your core and being like, “How are you gonna support me here and make me bigger?”
That is the music industry now. It's not just, you know, brand new, but I've heard too many podcasts and read too many articles recently about having your artists build their super fandom and connect with their super fans, because that is where money is at. Who cares about the general public?
Tamar Herman
I was listening to a podcast recently, and they were talking to someone who's running this fan data platform called Fave, and I was just listening to it, and part of me was cringing at how commodified they were making the fandom. And then the rest of me was like, why are you cringing so much? This is what has been happening for ages.
You're gatekeeping the capitalism hack for a music success in the 21st century. You're stopping them. You're ruining it. This, actually, yeah, it gets to something: The reason everything is AKB speaks so much to me personally. You mentioned this super fan thing which I've seen come up a lot, too. I believe both of us probably read every Luminate Tuesday Take and see this on a weekly basis basically.
But there's a word for super fans in Japanese culture, and there's actually different ones. Some would call them otaku, which are people who have a, some would say, unhealthy obsession with a single thing. Or wota, which is what idol fans are referred to, which has always had this really nerdy connotation. It's really about like, yeah, you're a guy who loves. But now that's become a super fan, and that's something everybody wants. And to me it's like, I remember when this kind of behavior was looked at as like, “Oh, Japan is such an outlier, such a weird place.” It was looked down upon, with, honestly, disrespect.
Especially there was this with the golden days of AKB48. It was always, “Look at J-pop, look at K-pop, and look at AKB48 creeping me out.” Meanwhile I could look at Girls’ Generation, and like it was this weird competition. But the truth is, now we have reached far. It's like, no, everything was just overlapping. And now this is the norm, and we should appreciate that AKB48 was either showing us where things would go, or perhaps giving us a warning that we should have paid more attention to.
