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The story
On 5ch’s Hello! Project discussion board, posters took notice that the all-male idol group M!LK (under talent agency Stardust Promotion) has grown big enough to run an arena tour. Someone posted a 2026 attendance-numbers ranking showing YOASOBI and Nogizaka46 both pulling over 500,000 fans this year, while M!LK sits at only around 170,000. Even so, opinions clashed over the jump to arena-sized venues — “the agency’s strategy is just bad” versus “it all comes down to whether you can book the venue in time” — and the talk spread into comparisons of venue size and attendance with fellow Stardust/EBiDAN (a talent-agency idol collective) act Chou Tokkyu (“Super Express”), as well as with other Hello! Project groups.
What people said
Kis-My-Ft2: 1
KinKi Kids: 1
Six Tones: 2
Snow Man: 4
timelesz: 2
Kanjani8: 1
King & Prince: 3
Kento Nakajima: 3
Naniwa Danshi: 2
Aぇ! group: 3
NEWS: 1
Arashi: 1
Ryosuke Yamada: 1
Takahisa Masuda: 1
Travis Japan: 2
Toma Ikuta: 1
Kitterez: 1
Johnny's (Starto) total: 29
M!LK: 8 ← this
EBiDAN: 1
Juice=Juice: 2
Re: #1
And to think Music Station was originally created for Johnny's talent in the first place.
They'd make plenty of profit, no problem — their merch runs on brutal blind-box/random-pull sales tactics too.
I mean, it's been over a year since they blew up. They should've locked in bigger venues the moment "Ii Jan" (M!LK's breakout hit) made them popular.
Not Budokan — you mean Chou Tokkyu's dome show.
I only really know Chou Tokkyu from back when composer Kenichi Maeyamada was writing a ton of songs for them, but once M!LK started taking off, I did notice the agency pushing Chou Tokkyu hard too — like a bundled package deal ("バーター," agency slang for pairing a weaker act with a popular one on the same booking). In Hello! Project terms, it'd be like Morning Musume getting the push instead of Juice=Juice.
YOASOBI → 570,000
Nogizaka46 → 500,000
NiziU → 240,000
Equal Love → 220,000
FRUITS ZIPPER → 200,000
CUTIE STREET → 180,000
AKB48 → 170,000
M!LK → 170,000 ←←←←← this
Morning Musume → 150,000
Juice=Juice → 100,000
HANA → 100,000
Angerme → 90,000
Momoiro Clover Z → 80,000
Candy Tune → 60,000
Ocha Norma → 30,000
Makes sense for M!LK though — they're doing a hall tour (smaller theater-sized venues, not arenas) and they're all over the media, so this tracks.
M!LK has popularity, but Tokkyu doesn't, does it?
Wait, really? I thought the order was Equal Love in 2024, then M!LK in 2025?
Equal Love was already popular back in 2021.
Equal Love already had a solid, steady fanbase even before "Tokubetsu na Sonzai ni Naru CHU!!" (a TV drama they appeared in), but they only blew up to this scale because of that show — so it's probably around the same time as [M!LK's] "Ii Jan."
Back when M!LK were still unknown underground idols, they got a full one-hour special on an Abema (streaming service) show hosted by [Morning Musume's] Fukumura Mizuki — treatment way above what M!LK normally got at the time, and M!LK fans endlessly thanked Fukumura for it. A while later, in 2025, M!LK had their huge breakout with "Sukisugite Metsu" (song title, roughly "I Love You Too Much, It's Ruin").
You post this exact same copypasta every single time.
Wait, it was actually a talking point back then?
Morning Musume has never even done a dome show to begin with — heck, even Sayumi's graduation concert, which people said could've filled a Saitama Super Arena-sized venue, ended up at Yokohama Arena with a ticket-lottery bloodbath of rejections.
Feels like at Stardust, it's really just the same drifting fans circulating from one group to the next.
My childhood friend was a Hello! Project fan, got hooked on M!LK, and is now a full-on EBiDAN otaku — stanning M!LK, Chou Tokkyu, Lienel, Genjibu, and Ii Ondo all at once (the latter three are smaller EBiDAN-affiliated idol units).
Like, "I can't get tickets! Just do a dome already!"?
At the earliest, late next year.
Then why didn't they just give the dome to M!LK instead?
YOASOBI → 570,000
Nogizaka46 → 500,000
Chou Tokkyu → 240,000 ←←←←← this
NiziU → 240,000
Equal Love → 220,000
FRUITS ZIPPER → 200,000
CUTIE STREET → 180,000
AKB48 → 170,000
M!LK → 170,000
Morning Musume → 150,000
Juice=Juice → 100,000
HANA → 100,000
Angerme → 90,000
Momoiro Clover Z → 80,000
Candy Tune → 60,000
Ocha Norma → 30,000
Airi Suzuki → 18,000
Whoa, Chou Tokkyu's really that big?
This table's wrong. Nogizaka, FRUITS ZIPPER, and Juice are all way too low.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The attendance ranking repeatedly posted in this thread is an unofficial tally of questionable accuracy — as post #77 itself notes (“this table’s wrong”) — so it shouldn’t be taken as hard fact. The mismatch between venue size and tour scale reflects a structural issue: major arenas and domes typically have to be reserved years ahead of time, so even if a group’s popularity suddenly spikes, there’s often no time left to secure a bigger venue before the tour has to go on sale. Equal Love’s earlier dome booking, made by betting on its own future popularity, illustrates exactly this point. The disagreement over the agency’s strategy is also tangled up with the differing treatment Stardust/EBiDAN gives M!LK versus Chou Tokkyu, as well as differences in revenue structure — merchandise sales among them — between groups, making this a more complicated issue than a simple popularity ranking alone.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Turns Out M!LK Sells This Well and They’re Only Doing an Arena Tour.”
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