Kiseki Knot is 8th on Oricon weekly digital downloads with 7,933 units sold. On the other hand 4,369 sales was enough for Bump of Chicken to reach 20th spot this week. This means Bluerose (5th on the daily chart), Comet (6th), and Kimi Dake no Melody (6th) all sold less than that. On Billboard's weekly digital downloads Bluerose is 94th with the rest of the chuuba songs failing to make an appearance. I find this a bit weird, because Comet was paired with Bluerose as a double single and it's hard to see how Suisei's first song finally getting a commercial release would sell significantly less than the new one. Unfortunately Billboard doesn't report sale numbers.
Oricon's numbers appear to be more accurate since their data includes music DOT jp and Oricon's own store. Still, it's quite weird if Bluerose and Kiseki Knot are seemingly selling so differently just because of the difference of two additional sites reporting their numbers. Not really sure if there is some weird weighting going on on the charts. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has any ideas about what's going on in here.
Kiseki Knot ought to net some radio play out of it's position on Oricon. This happened with Ghost which was on Oricon's weekly digital downloads chart 11th as well as 5th on Billboard's weekly digital downloads the week of it's release. It also spent three weeks lingering on Billboard charting 19th and 97th on the following weeks. On it's release week it also charted 100th on the presumably far more important Japan Hot 100 chart. This makes me wonder if Suisei didn't have some kind of plan with her release schedule. With Bluerose on 25th of June, another orison on July 8th with 03:12 on July 14th seems like they hoped to repeat Ghost's success by keeping her name on the charts culminating with the release of Taku Inoue's single which is likely to bring attention to her. If this is the case then it failed, although on the 8th Tenkyuu is almost certainly going to be the "b-side" of the next double single and it has 5m more views than Comet, so that release might be able to build some more hype.
For total sales an interesting thing is the webstore Ototoy which is not included on either Oricon or Playboard. Chuubas absolutely dominate it's charts and, as far as I'm aware, it's the only place where you can get chuuba songs as FLACs and ALACs as well as Hi-res. Considering that the Japanese are still more prone to buy physical copies, downloadable lossless formats might be more appealing to them, but this is pure speculation on my part and more likely than not reaching. However, there is also the impact of Holocaust which could also encourage gachikois to buy lossless from there for archival purposes. The store has to sell something to stay operational, but I'm not too sure how much given that Next Color Planet is a year later 41st on the monthly list, but there's a chance that those first couple of days after release do indeed sell quite well even if everything is ultimately guessing. Of course, since it is the only place to buy lossless and allows PayPal, foreign credit cards and so on, those numbers are boosted by foreigners. I haven't bothered to keep an eye out for iTunes etc. in other countries, so I won't even begin to guess.
