Anime DVD/BD Sales in Japan

For the 2016 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”. It’d primarily, though not exclusively, cover the prime time/late night series we mostly focus on here.

2011-2016 Retail vs Rental (JP): 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017

2001-2016 Totals (EN): 2001-2016

Google Doc source data: [link]

2001-2017, Total (¥ is units of ¥1 million)

2011-2017, Retail Only

2011-2017, Rental Only

Comments
1. Chart format:
• For 2001-2010 we only have the combined totals. This is because the JVA numbers we’ve been looking at each year have always included rental copies. Not number of times they’re rented out, but rather copies sold to rental shops. As far as I know Oricon does not cover sales of rental copies.
• The data is available in three ways – the images, the raw data tables below the images, and maybe most usefully, in a google sheet linked near the top of the post.
• Note that the Rental + Retail numbers don’t exactly match the totals JVA provides in their other reports. The totals are generally a bit higher. The difference is not very significant, but if you add them up and wonder why they’re off, that’s just how it is in their data.
• “%” column in the table means a percentage of all disc sales across all genres/categories.
• “Other” in the chart is overwhelmingly VHS, though there’s some other weird formats making up tiny amounts too.

2. Comparisons to other categories:
• Domestic Animation for Adults category is back over 30% of total retail sales (from 27% last year) which is in line with 2011 onward where we have the retail/rental split. In terms of Rental it’s down by revenue but up by units.
• Overall, the category is back up to 26.8% of the market by revenue, same as 2015 and in line with where it’s been historically. By units it’s up to 17.1%, the best since 2013.
• This category retained 99.0% of 2016 revenues and 106.7% of 2016 units, compared to the video market as a whole retaining 91.5%/88.6%.
• This puts us back in the 2010-2015 trend where anime is weathering the decline in physical media a bit better than the rest of he market.
• Domestic Animation for Adults reclaims its position as the largest category. Last year it was surpassed, for the first time ever, by Domestic Music (think of all them concert discs). But a major decline in that category this year put anime back on top.

3. Comparisons to recent years:
• 2017 is only the second year since 2005 (the other being 2013) that retail sales actually increased.
• We see that even with BD’s proportionally huge bump in rental numbers in 2017, it’s still a laughably small part of the rental market.
• Interestingly, rentals were markedly down in revenue, but up in units. I’m guessing this is largely due to Kimi no Na wa, which perhaps had cheaper rental unit prices than usual?
• Because of those cheap rentals, 2017 is technically slightly lower overall than 2016, but it’s only down 1%. Since retail sales were slightly up and rental units were slightly up, we can call this a tie.
• 2017 did get back up over the 10 million units sold mark. Last year that had dipped to 9.8 million units, the first time below 10 million since 2001. That said, units sold is becoming an increasingly less important number as late night anime starts moving towards less volumes with higher MSRPs each. Better to keep an eye on sales revenues.
• Note: technically I don’t know for certain that Kimi no Na wa is in this category, because the category doesn’t list what it covers. But the only other domestic animation category is animation for kids, and the entire unit sales reported for that category is less than what KnNw alone sold, so it has to be part of the “adults” category.

All in all, 2017 was just about identical to 2016. Whether a ¥50bn market is the new baseline, or whether the lack of a Kimi no Na wa level blockbuster in 2018 will result in 2018 resuming the decline remains to be seen.

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.