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leafy sea dragon wrote:

How did that law even exist? Did the record labels all lobby for it?

Retail Price Maintenance, it's called. You don't do it through law, you do it through contract, "it is a condition of [wholesale] sale that you agree not to on-sell this product for less than X". Or informal social pressure, or yakuza, or what-have-you.

It's prohibiting it that requires legislative action. For a local for us example:

https://www.accc.gov.au/business/anti-competitive-behaviour/imposing-minimum-resale-prices#resale-price-maintenance

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca2010265/s48.html

There's bucketloads of formal studies on this and I'm not anything like an expert: short form is, it improves the positions of smaller retailers and wholesalers relative to large retailers and consumers. Usually by most metrics that's not a net improvement, but whatever.

enurtsol wrote:

Prices for music product have always been legally protected from discounting — the prices are actually printed onto the product itself, so historically, there has never been any retail price war to drive prices down. The equivalent of Best Buy or Walmart cannot sell CDs at a deep discount in order to get customers in the door.

@nargun: ^That sounds more like a law prohibiting markdowns. Here potato chips have the price printed on the package by the manufacturer (and such snacks are one of the few things I can think of that do) but that doesn't stop stores from discounting them all the time.

lebrel wrote:

Same for the "nen" in shounen/seinen; they both mean "man".
[...]
shou-nen: (very) young man, boy
sei-nen:young (but not as young) man

That's actually incorrect. The "nen" means "year" so shounen is literally "few years" and seinen is young years (literally "blue" years).

nargun wrote:

Target demographic info alone isn't hugely useful.

But it is objectively defined. It is the reason that the manga infoboxes on Wikipedia have a Demographic field, but not a genre field; there were two many arguments over subjective genres ("there's more than one girl in the main cast, it's obviously a harem!", "two minor female characters hold hands in one chapter, this is a yuri manga!").

It isn't all that important when it comes to bound volumes, but magazines have regular and dedicated readers who will encounter a particular title because it is in the magazine they read, and those stories are tailored to suit a specific demographic (sometimes broad, sometimes.... there's anthology magazines dedicated to pachinko and golf).