>>964735
>>964785
>>964816
Hate to run noombers, but after Everglow number pushing, I guess it's something we all have to deal with. Cover is public now. Executives are going to put them in a hole and blast them with a hose if they don't get the results they want.
3D lives are expensive. Dokibird's birthday minilive (30 minutes in person, 38 minutes director's cut on YT) was 50k. She mentioned that she was on the cheap end, with high 5 figures being the norm and blowing past 6 figures not being unusual. To put it in perspective, a new grad working at Cover has a starting salary of 4 million yen, which is around 25k USD due to Japan's economy being in the toilet. So it'd cost like two manager's salary to produce. Making up for these costs is quite difficult. For 3D lives, Mori mentioned that she's backed by UMG, but the girls are lucky if they break even. Even if they had some sort of merch to go with it, current time is awful. Merch sales in the US are down, and it'll take work for them to partially recover through external collabs. Ruze mentioned that they were trying to push alternate metrics to prove that there's enough interest to give them bigger things, but I can't them getting more shit until one of their new avenues works well enough to show some sort of bump in growth. Or if they're willing to shell out themselves, at least this year.
I'd rather they concentrate more on cheap things that demonstrate unity in the upcoming year to try to get some sort of consistently fun vibe going again. In the end, that's what concerts and special events are supposed to be about. Meanwhile, the mood up to Everglow was so off that NijisanjiEN's members did a better job hyping up Everglow than half our branch. Would prefer to delay big events and do them properly than have them out just to have them.
StarsJP had that poker thing last year, and I believe that's when they had their black/white group covers? Don't know if they could get EN as guests for the group activity. Maybe Astel can lock himself in a room until midnight again, but this time with orange men. (Though 3D karaoke would be fun, now that everyone in both branches have theirs. That partial one from 2024 holofes was fun.)