Anime DVD/BD Sales in Japan

For the 2014 JVA report post, see this post.

The numbers below are for the category 日本のｱﾆﾒｰｼｮﾝ(一般向け) which the official translated reports list as “Animation for Grown-ups Domestic” though 一般向け more means “general public”. I assume they’re defining the general public as “not kids”. But it’s not strictly late night anime, as the numbers really show once you get to unit counts.

2001-2015 report: http://jva-net.or.jp/en/genre_2001-2015_en.pdf (EN)

2001-2015, sales in millions of yen

2001-2014, sales in units

Comments
1. Format split:
• This is the first time BD has ever moved more total units. It’s been ahead in revenue since 2012 due to higher average unit cost, but had never cracked that 50% unit count.
• Japanese animation for adults/general public continues to have a much much higher degree of BD dominance than anything else – except for foreign animation for adults/general public. This was also the case last year. This is likely lingering Frozen sales (added 140,152 in 2015) plus some other big Disney/Pixar movies, especially Big Hero 6 (317,675) which I assume also went into this category. Those movies tend to do single releases that bundle DVD and BD together, which means all the sales get categorized as BD. If they were released on both formats separately, I imagine at least 40% of their sales would be on DVD if not much more.

2. How these numbers compare to the numbers we deal with:
As usual, don’t underestimate everything we’re not seeing through Oricon. Particularly through the intentionally limited subset of series I track on this website. The aggregate total sales of every disc with a release date in 2015, per my spreadsheet, is 4,101,473 (down from 4,537,410 in 2014). That’s only 35% of the 11,699,832 being reported by JVA. (Interestingly, 35% matches the 2014 number. Almost two-thirds of the market is still “invisible” to us, either due to being unreported or just outside the scope of what I cover. Movies are part of it because I only added up TV volumes and some OVAs, but nowhere near enough to close the gap.)

Some of the more obvious reasons are that my number:
• Isn’t including any pre-2015 releases selling in 2015, though it includes the smaller category of 2015 releases ranking in 2016 up until the point I posted this.
• Is almost exclusively late night TV anime, while the JVA category is undoubtedly much broader.
• Misses anything that didn’t make Oricon’s rankings.
• Is subject to the usual Oricon undercounting.
• Would only represent sales (estimates), which would of course be less than shipped numbers, if that’s what JVA is using.
• Rental! It’s not as prevalent as it used to be but it’s still a significant part of the industry and not covered by Oricon.

The point is, there’s a whole lot more to the industry than what the usual late night anime sales tracking community either can or is interested in covering and this is important to remember. Different sources sliced in different ways tell different stories.

3. Comparisons to other categories:
• Share of the overall video disc market (by revenue) is still relatively high, if not as high as in 2013-2014. But it’s higher than every other year since 2001 onward, so the third highest overall. But a strong share of a weakening market is only small comfort.
• For some perspective, while anime is having a rough time, the four Drama International/Asian categories have accounted for a very large percentage of the entire video disc market’s decline. In the first half of the 00s, they accounted for 40-45% of all revenue. In the second half they were 30-35%. They dipped below 30% in 2011 and have continued to shrink ever since, down to 24.1% of the market in both 2014 and 2015. A comparable change in our adults/general public domestic animation category would be dramatically more devastating than anything we’ve seen here. Drama International/Asian used to account for ¥120-170bn. The entire market in 2015 was only ¥218bn. Japanese people simply stopped buying foreign TV series and films on home video over the last decade and that more that anything has contributed to the decline of the video disc market.
• Japanese animation for adults/general public remains the biggest single category in the JVA report, although “Music Domestic”, the perpetual #2, is much closer this year than in the past. In the early-mid 00s, our category was making 2-3 times Music Domestic’s total, but now the latter has a rather close 24.1% of the market vs the former’s 26.8%.

4. Comparisons to recent years:
• While 2013 was unusually strong, 2015 is not just a step down compared to 2013, it’s a step down compared to every year from 2002 onward. And this despite record numbers of series being animated. Remove 2013, and units sold is an unbroken decline every year from 2005 onward.
• That’s not unique to anime, that’s the state of physical media in general. Streaming services are getting more widely used (yes even in Japan) as well. But nonetheless, this is not good news. …Especially because 2016 is sure as heck not going to reverse this trend, given how abysmally it’s performed so far.

Once again, a disclaimer that bears a reminder: the late night anime I track on this site does not match 1:1 to this genre category. It should be contained within it, but other things will count in it as well. You cannot use these numbers to measure with perfect accuracy the performance of late night anime as a whole. It is possible for late night to do better or worse than these numbers show.