From our other sites
The story
A visualization showing how much fan overlap exists across the Hello! Project lineup went viral on 5ch. Among Hello! Project’s own 8 groups — Morning Musume., ANGERME, Juice=Juice, and the rest — 24 of 28 possible pairings (86%) show shared listenership. But pairings with female idol groups from other agencies hit only 23 out of 152 possible combinations, and most of those were carried by Juice=Juice alone. The thread lit up with the line “everyone except Juice and Beyoo is an NPC” (village extras, i.e. nobodies), and opinion split on how to read the data: are Hello Pro fans just not listening to other idols, or are other fandoms simply not listening to Hello Pro?
What people said
https://x.com/tsurezure_lab/status/2110011641337426040?s=46&t=5qtRP6_0qseWSyAlZFxpvQ
Delete it! Delete it! Delete it! Delete it! Delete it! Delete it! Delete it! Delete it!
Probably just a lot of fans who stan both ("kenwota" — dual-fandom listeners).
Ebichu x Hello Pro → ✕
Ebichu x Juice=Juice → ◯
Uh, AKB48 fans do listen to Morning Musume., though?
That's exactly why they don't sell — nobody outside the fandom is listening
Is that really something to brag about?
No overlap with idol fans who are just chasing after some generic hot face
That's exactly why other idol fans look down on you guys
The line only forms if both sides are listening to each other.
Hello Pro fans don't listen to other groups, so there's no way for a line to even appear
That'd actually be the important one lol
Why should liking music get me mocked for it?
If anything, I'm just not into the generic pretty faces other idol fans are busy stanning
You're getting mocked because you claim it's all about the music and then immediately start talking about faces
ANGERME
Literally nobody's listening to these, huh
Musume. fans do listen to AKB48 — but literally nobody listens to ANGERME lol
Sounds like a "mild yankee" (slang for insular types who never leave their hometown scene) living their whole life in a tiny bubble
How do you even determine someone's a "Hello Pro fan" in the first place? Enlighten me lol
Or that other fandoms aren't listening to Hello Pro's songs?
Maybe that'd hold up if people actually gave it a listen — but nobody does
If both sides are listening to each other, the line connects.
If only one side is, it doesn't
So what data was this even based on? Show your source
Spotify data
Probably went through each group's page like this one on October 12-13 and checked the pairings
https://open.spotify.com/intl-ja/artist/4cDFYGC0CtsN86zvpCXsi4/related
Probably around when everyone was figuring out what to do with Hello Pro after Tsunku was gone, and Hashimoto started pushing the "we're putting real care into the music!" angle on YouTube and elsewhere
Probably because low-skill, mass-produced idol groups multiplied.
It curdled into this ugly elitist mindset, didn't it
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
These figures appear to be based on Spotify’s “related artists” feature, which the original poster linked to directly. That feature, however, produces estimates derived from overlapping listening histories and playlists — it isn’t primary data that directly shows whether individual fans are actually listening to both artists. That’s why some in the thread pointed out that “this chart doesn’t tell you which side isn’t listening,” making it premature to conclude that no shared listenership automatically means Hello Pro fans don’t listen to other groups. The fact that the seven groups besides Juice=Juice and Beyooooonds show almost no connections to other agencies’ groups also ties into Hello! Project’s history of building its own distinct fan culture, with some commenters pointing to a fanbase that places unusually heavy weight on musicianship.
※This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “Hello Pro found to have no listeners outside Juice and Beyoo but NPCs.”
Leave a Reply