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

• Korea has had massive success in combating online piracy. A combination of a "three-strikes" local policy and an aggressive legal strategy against the 40 biggest K-pop piracy sites worldwide — called Operation Top 40 — resulted in these sites being shut down and in Korea receiving significant financial damages. Before this approach, online piracy was so pervasive that the logic at the time was to price downloads so low that they could compete with the illegal sites (hence the 5 cent price). This is no longer the case. When it came to shutting down illegal sites emanating from the U.S., Korea filed suit in California, where many servers for social networking sites are located. Interestingly, the fact that the Korean artwork had been registered with the copyright office became the 'smoking gun' to nail copyright infringement in the courts.

• Korea has three copyright societies and the protection of intellectual property rights is rigorously upheld by law.

As more K-pop stars surf the commercial success of the “hallyu” or Korean wave, the money they are making from sales abroad is rising significantly too.

Last year alone the export of K-pop content grew 20 percent to 260 billion won ($235 million) and industry watchers speculate that the market will maintain its current size or get slightly bigger.

When asked what he thinks K-pop can gain with a launch into the European market, Kim Youngmin proudly said that the European market is estimated to be worth 7 trillion Won. This basically means it's larger than the US (6 trillion), Japan (4 trillion), and China (1 trillion). He also mentioned that it's not their main goal to get into the charts and sell enormous amounts of CD's, as they're planning to attract people's attention to the Asian music market through the expanding popularity of K-pop music.

And for Japan and its music industry, what do you think it can learn from K-pop and the Hallyu wave?

Amy: Japan is completely miserable at spreading their music products outside of Japan. Like Jasper and Nicholas have mentioned, Japan has no need to do this, given that its own market can sustain its music industry extremely comfortably without outside help, but at a certain point, it starts to read like arrogance. This is a global age. It’s close-minded for Japanese music companies to shut out YouTube as aggressively as they have. It’s just unthinkable and extremely irritating for fans trying to get a better sense of Japan’s pop cultural products to be unable to find leads anywhere. It doesn’t help that merchandise coming out of Japan is ridiculously overpriced either, so it’s like Japan is actively trying to discourage anyone from gaining access to their pop culture, which is short-sighted.

mdo7, can you shut the hell about Korea for once in your life on this site, or is it always "Korealand, Korealand über alles" with you? By this point, you're soapboxing on it.

This time, like it or not, they do have a good point about pointing out about the need to branch out at the very least.

to pay $30+ a pop per volume is a bit much for anyone.

walw6pK4Alo wrote:

mdo7, can you shut the hell about Korea for once in your life on this site, or is it always "Korealand, Korealand über alles" with you? By this point, you're soapboxing on it.

This time, like it or not, they do have a good point about pointing out about the need to branch out at the very least. There have been times that I've heard actual good songs that's performed 100% in English and understandable that could've made it's way to being played internationally, instead of just localized. Hell, the Super Eurobeat collections has been something a lot of people wish to get worldwide, instead of just from Japan (with 220+ volumes now), to pay $30+ a pop per volume is a bit much for anyone.


So in this case, take it easy for this moment, and take a closer look at what actually can be done to help, instead of bashing each other.

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

Standard mdo7 "Korea, Korea, Korea" rant.

The article seems a bit misleading, because it's juxtaposing two sets of facts (the introduction of the Download law and the stagnation of the music industry) to suggest that there's a demonstrable connection between the two, without actually substantiating that parallel. 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.