Meet AKB48, the most popular music group you’ve never heard of.

Music is subjective, however, money is the easiest measure of success, you can write the most intricate and epic song in history, however, if it doesn’t sell a million copies, history and most importantly, Wikipedia, isn’t going to pay attention. So you’d probably expect that one of the best selling groups of all time would be one you’ve at least heard of, right? Well, chances are, the word AKB48 means less to you than if we’d just typed gibberish, in fact, we probably could have done that since AKB48 is just a collection of random letters and numbers anyway. What the hell has made a band with a name you can’t even pronounce so popular?

AKB48 consists of around 90, yes, 90! Teenage Japanese girls who all dress like an anime fan’s wet dream. Unbelievably, they’re insanely popular with Japanese men. In perhaps one of the most diabolically shitty moves ever pulled by a music group, the group often hold “elections” in which fans can decide which girl gets to front the group for the following year, by buying a CD. Yes, to get a vote, fans first have to buy one of the group’s singles, some fans have been known to buy hundreds of CDs in order to secure more votes for their favorite singer.

So the next time you want to call Justin Bieber’s fans sad, just remember that somewhere out there, there is a middle-aged Japanese businessman sat on a throne of bubblegum pop CD’s staring at a scale model doll of a 16 year old Japanese school girl, because oh yeah, they make those.

Source.