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The story
A thread titled “There Are Seriously No Hit Songs This Year” went up on 5ch’s Hello! Project board, sparking discussion about just how few hit songs there’ve been this year ahead of the year-end Kōhaku Uta Gassen (NHK’s New Year’s Eve song contest). The songs brought up were all idol tracks — M!LK’s “Sukisugite Horobu” (Dying From Loving You Too Much) and “Bakuretsu Aishiteru” (Explosively In Love), Juice=Juice’s “More! Mi Amore,” and Mona-Q’s “Honma Yade☆Nande Yanen☆Shiran Kedo” (That’s Right☆Why Though☆Dunno) — with repeated comments that nothing resembling a true nationwide hit could be found. The thread split between those who chalked it up to “an inevitable result of music tastes diversifying” and those who argued “this year’s female artists just didn’t have the strength,” with HANA and CUTIE STREET also floated as possible Kōhaku contenders.
What people said
It's an era where everyone just listens to whatever they personally want, whenever, wherever.
Sukisugite Horobu (M!LK)
Bakuretsu Aishiteru (M!LK)
Yes Tokyo (EBiDAN)
Honma Yade☆Nande Yanen☆Shiran Kedo (Mona-Q)
More! Mi Amore (Juice=Juice)
that's about it.
The women just didn't bring it this year, period.
Last year it was frustrating thinking 'if only they'd released Mi Amore sooner we might've made Kōhaku' — but in hindsight the timing actually worked out perfectly.
This year it's working in their favor.
That Mona-Q boom ended in a flash.
Then again, it'd already been done way before that.
Same as the Sakamichi groups — nobody outside the fandom actually knows it.
Probably "ROSE" or "TIGER" or something.
It's gotta be "Blue Jeans."
Wait, seriously?
That's only from the last day or two, so it won't show up in the numbers yet.
Maybe something like iLiFE! actually ends up blowing up for real.
iLiFE! signed with Sony, so the full-on push starts next year.
What gets dropped in exchange is some other Sony act that's lost buzz lately — HANA, maybe.
Kōhaku's originally a show for one-hit wonders, though.
Acts with staying power only within their own fanbase but low general song recognition are actually the ones out of place there.
Though they probably won't show up lol
Wasn't there a staging bit they tried and failed to pull off last time?
Makes you wonder if HANA's really gonna be okay.
NiziU at least sold out once, but the others fizzled before they even recouped the investment.
Stardust's grinding hard to recoup the losses from Mei Nagano.
More like it's aimed squarely at little kids.
The last ballad that actually got big was probably Eito's "Kōsui" (Perfume), I think.
Though even that one basically just got consumed as a TikTok meme.
Can't "Kawadame" get them in?
If they couldn't make it last year, they're probably not making it this year either.
Last year was just agency politics — seniority-based favoritism.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Selecting the lineup for NHK’s Kōhaku Uta Gassen is an annual process in which talent agencies and the broadcaster negotiate based on the year’s hit songs and buzz, and the thread’s starting point is bafflement, within that framework, at how few candidate songs there are this year. The ones mentioned — M!LK’s “Sukisugite Horobu” and “Bakuretsu Aishiteru,” Juice=Juice’s “More! Mi Amore,” and Mona-Q’s “Honma Yade☆Nande Yanen☆Shiran Kedo” — are all idol songs centered on the Hello! Project and Stardust Promotion stables, and the scale of their popularity is hard to call a nationwide smash, which is what kicked off the discussion. Opinion split between two views: that “music has diversified and the era of everyone listening to the same song is over,” and that “this year’s female artists simply lacked momentum” — neither backed up by any chart data presented in the thread. There was also a point raised that Kōhaku selection isn’t just about ratings or name recognition but is also shaped by balance between agencies and seniority norms, meaning reading inclusion or exclusion as a simple popularity contest may not match how selections are actually made.
※This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “There Are Seriously No Hit Songs This Year.”
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