Not Yet "Already" (Nippon Columbia)
The sun isn't quite setting on the AKB48 empire, but 2014 has so far shown that things might be slowing down a bit for the army-sized pop group. Its singles still top the Oricon chart, but last year the group could move more than 1 million units during first-week sales. Now, it takes longer to do that.
General search-engine interest in AKB48 has also dipped. One possible reason for this could be over-saturation, in which case subgroup Not Yet might be paying the price. The quartet's debut album, "Already," suffers artistically from this "omnipresence" strategy and comes off like a boring collection of previously underwhelming ideas used in AKB48 tracks.