The Oricon Singles Chart is the Japanese music industry-standard singles popularity chart issued daily, weekly, monthly and yearly by

Oricon , established in 1999, is the holding company at the head of a Japanese corporate group that supplies statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that ...

. Chart rankings are based on physical singles' sales. Until 2017, Oricon did not track download sales. In Japan, physical sales decreased sharply in the 2000s, while download sales hit three to four times the amount of single sales. In November 2017, Oricon introduced its first digital songs chart, separate from its main physical singles chart. On December 24, 2018, Oricon launched a streaming chart, and introduced a combined singles chart that utilizes physical single sales, downloads, and streams. Original Confidence Inc., the original Oricon company, was founded by the former Snow Brand Milk Products promoter Sōkō Koike in 1967. That November, the company began publishing a singles chart on an experimental basis. Entitled . The chart became official on January 4, 1968. Charts are published every Tuesday in Oricon Style and on Oricon's official website. Every Monday, Oricon receives data from outlets, but data on merchandise sold through certain channels does not make it into the charts. For example, the debut single of

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, a pop group, was released only through

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stores, which are not covered by Oricon, and its sales were not reflected in the Oricon charts. Oricon's rankings of

record sales Record sales or music sales are activities related to selling music recordings (albums, singles, or music videos) through physical record shops or digital music stores. Record sales reached their peak in 1999, when 600 million people spent an ...

are therefore not completely accurate. Before data was collected electronically, the charts were compiled on the basis of faxes that were sent from record shops. The first number-one song on the Oricon Singles Chart was "" by

Jackey Yoshikawa and His Blue Comets Jackey Yoshikawa and His Blue Comets ( ) is a Japanese GS band, active from 1957. History of the band The band formed in 1957 just as The Blue Comets. In 1963 they renamed "Jackie Yoshikawa and the Blue Comets" with Jackie Yoshikawa serving ...

Best-selling physical singles of all time

See also

References

External links