Lee posted this in the Alternative Idol group yesterday, and my heart swelled a little to see it:

That’s right — CD Japan’s going to be tracking international sales. Just theirs for now, but the sentiment in there, that other outlets will line up and provide figures of their own, that’s a great development. Yes, the really great thing is that maybe we’ll all start to matter more to the Japanese music industry, but the extraordinarily selfish part of me is practically leaping for joy at the possibilities.

First, though, look at the banner. In addition to that “We are not outliers” slogan being pretty g-d boss, the fact that a #CountMeInJapan hashtag exists tells me that CDJ’s got more cooking than just announcing a sales chart, so let’s all pay attention and try to help out any campaigning they do. It’s probably way easier than what I’m proposing!

See, I’ve always wanted to do something really dumb and ambitious. I’ve even alluded to it a few times, usually in the sense that it would be very difficult to accomplish without reasonably measurable sales outside of Japan. And this is no guarantee — this is only CD Japan so far, other outlets might not play along, it’s at best really labor-intensive to try to compile digital data, etc.

But how friggin’ cool would it be to get to actually do an idol fantasy league? Or use sales figures in the various stupid games we play? Like, Queen of the Scene is coming up (I’m thinking June/July if I can get my act together), and I only have a sketchy idea of how that’ll work right now; sales figures could be really helpful! Or hell, we could just power rankings like I started to try to do and then got too busy to devote time to as a regular thing. Best-of rankings. FANFIC!

There are a lot of options, is what I’m saying. And an idol fantasy league, modeled after fantasy football (probably), is my big target. Does that sound cool? What about some of the other stuff?

I just want to keep things fun and give us something to do more substantial than “read whatever stupid opinion Maniac has.” Everybody who contributes, whether it’s a write-up or a game or a translation or a comment, helps to do that, but I have goals with this project, and having more interesting things for people to do will seriously help us make more fans and lure more idols to the gold-plated shores of Places That Aren’t Japan.