Years after the mid-1990s, however, saw severer deterioration of the enka genre, and it became unusual for new enka CDs to become hits and sell as many as hundreds of thousands of copies in the late 1990s.
しかし1990年代も半ばを過ぎると演歌の衰退は激化し、1990年代末には演歌の新曲CDが数十万枚単位でヒットする例は極めて少なくなってしまった。