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NEWS: 1 Year After Japan's Stricter Download Law, Music Sales Stagnate

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mdo7 has some good points that can help expand J-Pop outside Japan

Except that no one from the Japanese companies is reading this and there's literary nothing anyone of us can do to "save" the Japanese music industry (if it even needs saving. Just because their sales have not increased doesn't mean they're going bankrupt). So all mdo7 is doing (and has been doing for a long time) is cluttering the forums with huge walls of text that say little more than "KOREA IS SO POPULAR AND JAPAN IS NOT".

Back on topic, I'm glad about this. Maybe companies will stop blaming piracy for the decline of their industry (music, anime, films, fried chips) and focus on finding the real problem. If they'd also realize that people who pirate won't magically start buying legal media just because you make piracy illegal (lol?) and instead try to reach out to those people through different ways that are not "BUY MY OVERPRICED SHIT OR GO TO JAIL" (coughpricescough) maybe, just maybe people wouldn't pirate so much.

Yeah, like I really expect that to happen.

PS. For all that it's worth, Koreas superduper antipiracy campaign is so successful I typed a random K-Pop name on google and found download sites in seconds.

It would have been just as bad if the article had been written 6 months ago, when the industry was seeing a net increase of sales: then the article would have been titled "6 Months After Japan's Stricter Download Law, Music Sales Increase", and it would have been equally as misleading. There are lots of factors to consider in regards to the growth/decline of the Japanese music market, and while the stricter download law is one such factor, making such a direct contrast in the article glosses over the broader trends of the local/global markets in favor of speculative correlation (and as the saying goes, "correlation doesn't imply causation").

To my knowledge, while physical CD sales in Japan actually saw a slight increase last year and flattened out in the past year, digital sales were on a decline in 2012 even before the new law came into effect, a trend that seems to have continued into 2013 (my understanding is that this is mostly attributed to a decline in the mobile market, where digital sales predominantly take place in Japan). Also as a matter of putting things into perspective, I think the Japanese music industry was recently recognized as the 2nd largest in the world, and was poised to overtake the United States this year. Most of the world's music industries have been seeing declines in both physical and digital sales, so Japan having seen an uptick last year and then flatlining into this year is actually fairly good in comparison. It's all a matter of perspective, and I have to wonder if the source article might have been a little biased in painting things with a negative brush specifically in contrast to the download law. I'd be interested to hear anyone with better statistics/data and perspective on the market to give their take on the trends.

That said, Japan's industry was doing around US$5B in sales at it's peak, sales have already dropped 50% in the last 15 years, and with the population now declining they're only going to drop faster unless Japan can start exporting it's music.

What's even funny is that, one year on, not a single soul has even been arrested due to this law! This law is all bark and no bite! Yet 40% of Japanese share left anyway.

The real problem is Japan needs to produce again enough music that people are willing to pay $30 for! Also reducing that price tag won't hurt.

Japan's music industry will suffer even more financial damage if Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's "Abenomics" (hike on sales tax) goes into effect.

Quote:

mdo7 has some good points that can help expand J-Pop outside Japan

So all mdo7 is doing (and has been doing for a long time) is cluttering the forums with huge walls of text that say little more than "KOREA IS SO POPULAR AND JAPAN IS NOT".

It's not soapboxing if it's relevant to the article being discussed. Turning half the thread in to a discussion about how much you dislike someone bringing up a topic on the other hand certainly could be soapboxing or trolling. Like it or not, his points are relevant to the article. If you don't like it then you don't have to read his posts or even acknowledge them, but we're not turning this thread in to a witch hunt.

raising the tax is going to make it worse

Let's see. The three percent increase in the sales tax would add 90 yen to the price of a 3000 yen CD. I hardly think that is going to have much effect on music sales.

Keonyn, Kikaioh said the article's source is misleading or a bit out of date, can we get some verification on when the original article source on this came out. I want to make sure what's happening to Japan's music market is grim as ANN article has stated.

mdo7 wrote:

raising the tax is going to make it worse

Let's see. The three percent increase in the sales tax would add 90 yen to the price of a 3000 yen CD. I hardly think that is going to have much effect on music sales.

I'm more curious about the penetration of iTunes, or iTunes-like services, in Japan, where people can purchase individual songs rather than entire CDs. CNN reported that this trend has cut overall music revenues in the US to about a quarter of what they were in 2000. According to this article, though, digital music is still in its infancy in Japan, largely because the labels refused to cooperate with Apple. Sony, in particular, did not license its catalog to iTunes until just last year.

Eliminating "resale price maintenance" on copyrighted items would make a big difference as well.

That's why PC gaming is popular in Korea unlike Japan. Korea is wired, Japan is not wired.

mdo7 wrote:

That's why PC gaming is popular in Korea unlike Japan. Korea is wired, Japan is not wired.

You are SOOO WRONG on this that it is not even funny.

It's not soapboxing if it's relevant to the article being discussed. Turning half the thread in to a discussion about how much you dislike someone bringing up a topic on the other hand certainly could be soapboxing or trolling.

It's not soapboxing if it's relevant to the article being discussed.

That's why PC gaming is popular in Korea unlike Japan.