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Answerman - Some People Can't Carry iTunes


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HitokiriShadow



Joined: 09 May 2005
Posts: 6251
PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 11:49 am Reply with quote
getchman wrote:
Horriblesubs are basically just light crunchyroll/funimation edits. seems extremely pointless


They're useful for people who live in countries that are region-locked out of those streams. Or for me, since CR has often been unwatchable for me in the past two years. I sometimes wonder why I bother keeping my subscription other than just "for support", but they do actually work properly sometimes.

DmonHiro wrote:
Seriously? There are people that are still going on about how "the anime industry in Japan is dying"? Yeah, it's on the verge of collapse. I mean look at the facts: more and more shows are created, more and more show are selling past 10.000 units per volume... wait...


This year is also looking to have the most 20k+ sellers in a while.
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larinon



Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:16 pm Reply with quote
MentalMachine wrote:
Back in 2004(I think) the home video market was about $4 billion. Now it's barely $800 million(according to ask John) which mean it took a 500% decline, if my math is correct.

It's actually an 80% decline, but that is still a significant percentage nonetheless. (For reference, a 100% decline means it drops to 0)

Not counting physical media, for new shows I probably watch 95% of my anime via legal internet streams. The remaining 5% is fansubs (from IRC, not Torrents). Every once in a while there is a show I want to see that is not streaming anywhere (someone please license Hyouka) or else I simply do not want to deal with Hulu and their ads. I have paid subscriptions to both CR and TAN. I wish Hulu provided an ad-free subscription tier.
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Polycell



Joined: 16 Jan 2012
Posts: 4623
PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:16 pm Reply with quote
I highly suspect most of the people who have problems with Crunchyroll's player are either using wifi connections or have crappy ISPs like most of America.

Personally, I haven't had any issues with their player when a cable's involved and very few when using my own wireless router instead of the one built into my cable modem.
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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:21 pm Reply with quote
I encounter occasional sluggishness using Crunchyroll at 720p, but for me it seems to vary by daypart. Viewing weeknights and weekends here in the US Eastern Time Zone (GMT-500) can sometimes stutter. I know CR uses a content distribution network and all, but I rarely see stuttering in weekday daytime hours.
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mdo7



Joined: 23 May 2007
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:35 pm Reply with quote
Polycell wrote:
I highly suspect most of the people who have problems with Crunchyroll's player are either using wifi connections or have crappy ISPs like most of America.

Personally, I haven't had any issues with their player when a cable's involved and very few when using my own wireless router instead of the one built into my cable modem.


That could be the real problem. Yeah I would recommend people using watching anime using wi-fi to switch to wired connection. Also I do agree about crappy ISPs like Comcast is sort of infamous for that. I'm not sure about Verizon or other ISPs. Don't use your 4G LTE smartphone tethering for your anime fix, that can eat up your 5GB (or whatever data plan you're using).
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Leebo



Joined: 14 Nov 2005
Posts: 660
Location: Somerville, MA
PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:37 pm Reply with quote
Weird, I have Comcast and use wifi. And I have 3 roommates.

Guess other people are just less lucky?
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Polycell



Joined: 16 Jan 2012
Posts: 4623
PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:44 pm Reply with quote
There are a lot of complications when it comes to determining the strength and stability of a wireless signal. You may also be closer to serverfarm for CR's CDN and thus have less possibility of Comcast screwing things up than for those further away.
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mdo7



Joined: 23 May 2007
Posts: 6359
Location: Katy, Texas, USA
PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 3:51 pm Reply with quote
Leebo wrote:
Weird, I have Comcast and use wifi. And I have 3 roommates.

Guess other people are just less lucky?


Well you're lucky and as you said, there are people that are unlucky when it comes to Wi-fi and a ISP.

For me, I watch anime, K-dramas on either my PC or on my LG Google Smart TV both wired and not wireless wi-fi (the problem with my wi-fi at home it tend to go off and on and that can ruin the video stream hence why I use wired connection). As I said for anyone with shoddy wi-fi:

-Use wired connection. Watch anime on laptop, PC, or on a Smart TV (CR, Youtube, Hulu apps on smart TV).
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MentalMachine



Joined: 09 Oct 2013
Posts: 74
PostPosted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 4:18 pm Reply with quote
larinon wrote:
It's actually an 80% decline, but that is still a significant percentage nonetheless. (For reference, a 100% decline means it drops to 0)


Thanks for that! I'm a damned Singaporean. Having sloppy Math like that is disgraceful. I need to brush up.
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 14871
PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 4:01 am Reply with quote
About the J-music industry:

"5 Reasons Japan’s Music Industry Is Booming… For Now"

  • 1. Things are more expensive in Japan - So, CDs are expensive in Japan, and the same goes for digital products. The average song on iTunes is 250 yen ($2.50). Japan certainly sells a lot of units, but what makes the market so big is that the price of each product is so high compared to the rest of the world.

  • 2. Price fixing on CDs - 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.

  • 3. Obsessive collectors inflate the market - Artists who have a rabid following (boy bands, female idols, and K-pop groups) will go even further and release multiple versions of one product — for example, a single album could come in three physical versions: The loyal fan needs all three versions of an album to complete the collection, with each one priced at 30 bucks or more. And girl group AKB48 had the top-five-selling singles of 2012 [the article quotes Swarts], and is an interesting study because their CDs are not just recorded music but currency for something else, like entry tickets for a meet-and-greet with the artist, or voting tickets for the annual election where fans pick a lead vocalist is for the upcoming single. The current size of the market is due largely to a handful of acts who have obsessive fans willing to buy three different versions of an album, or 100 copies of an AKB48 single, because it gets them 100 votes for their favorite girl in the election. The market will shrink when these acts wane in popularity and the value-added CD scheme no longer works.

  • 4. The illegal download revolution never happened here - There has been no Napster, no Bit Torrent, or anything similar, that was embraced by the Japanese youth. It could be that Japanese people are generally honest — or [we like this theory], it could be that the preferred mode of netsurfing for Japanese young people has always been the phone, which won’t allow much file sharing. Most people still buy (or rent) music from legitimate sources, and pay full price. There is concern about the digital future now, because the feature phone download business is tanking as everyone migrates to smartphones. Meanwhile, smartphone music downloads are not growing at the same pace.

  • 5. Physical rules because digital is still in its infancy - The conspiracy theory: Japanese record labels never wanted a real digital music market, because that would threaten the lucrative physical market. Mobile sites selling select singles at $4 a pop was okay. Letting iTunes or an equivalent build a library of music to rival that of a physical retailer was not okay. ITunes launched in Japan in 2005, but it wasn’t until 2012 that Sony Music Japan licensed its Japanese repertoire to Apple, meaning that iTunes Japan had been missing a significant chunk of the Japanese music scene for several years. Meanwhile, Sony’s Music Unlimited launched with an enormous international catalog, and also has Sony Japan material, but has nothing from Japanese major label Avex, which seems less cooperative with other platforms now that it has its own music/movie streaming service, called Uula. Conversely, Uula has no songs from Sony Japan. The bottom line is: There is no digital service that is so complete that it makes consumers think they can abandon CDs and go entirely digital. And that’s probably how the industry likes it.

    What’s next: Japan’s dream is to go global - The hot topic for everyone in the industry here is exporting Japanese music. It’s seen as the key to musicians’ and labels’ survival. Below is a YouTube playlist created by the industry association tasked with exporting Japanese music to the world.


But this article brings up some points about that:
"The Great Shift in Japanese Pop Culture"

  • Part One: Incomes and Consumer Expenditures in Decline

    Back when the Japanese economy was strong in the 1980s and even the mid-1990s, Japan arguably had the world’s most vibrant consumer culture. Now in the face of unemployment uncertainty and declining wages, consumers are cutting back, and in response, the marketplace has rapidly shifted from premium goods and services to supplying cheaper substitutes.

    So what has this meant for Japanese pop culture? Consumer spending on culture has declined almost parallel to wage decreases, and most markets — music, publishing, fashion — started to slowly implode even before the Internet decelerated demand for analog goods.

    The shrinking of cultural markets does not just mean less culture in Japan, however. The hollowing out process has had a distorting effect on the content of the actual culture being produced and distributed. As regular consumers exit the market and leading-edge consumers are forced back underground, “marginal segments” with highly concentrated buying power — particularly, the otaku, yankii, and gyaru — have taken a leadership position in setting tastes and trends. Over the course of this five-part series, we explain this process and also demonstrate the degree to which Japanese pop culture now caters to specific niche audiences rather than reflecting a “mainstream” set of values. Japan may have become the world’s first consumer market without a mass core — and this has significant implications for the future of its cultural exports.

  • Part Two: The Implosion of Cultural Markets

    Within Japan almost every single market for cultural goods has seen prolonged decreases in sales since the late 1990s or has headed into troubled waters.

    Music: The music market exploded in the 1990s thanks to karaoke, mini-CDs, TV tie-ups, and female-oriented J-Pop but that growth has been completely wiped out and now sales returning to late 1980s levels, even with increased digital downloads.

    Publishing: Revenues in the book and publishing industry decline yearly, and the manga and anime industries are in crisis. Manga magazine sales are collapsing, and even relatively stable single-title comic collections have started to drop. Consumer magazines are going under faster than new titles can be created; just in recent years, we’ve said goodbye to Esquire, Pinky, Studio Voice, and PS. Discount chain Book Off is increasingly unable to sell its cheap used books, CDs, and games. And of course, the Internet has also ravaged porn magazine sales, which kept many publishers in Japan able to support its other non-porn magazines.

    Isn’t the Internet making up for all of this cultural decline?

    Of course, most countries have also seen an implosion of “analog” content in the face of a digitizing world, and Japan is no exception to this trend. Despite high Internet penetration, however, web culture has yet to establish itself as a legitimate pillar of content in Japan. Most offline cultural producers, like newspapers and weekly magazines, do not put a significant amount of material online.

    There have been cultural and structural barriers towards moving offline content online and creating new web content businesses (see “The Fear… of the Internet”), and the overall result is that the Internet in Japan is not picking up the slack of the traditional culture markets as they shrink. Most importantly web use in Japan is relatively passive and anonymous, and this only further questions the culture created upon it.

  • Part Three: Mainstream Consumers vs. Marginal Subcultures

    From the 1960s to the end of the 1990s, the upper-middle class and middle-class controlled Japanese pop culture, yet there had always been a few important marginal youth consumer groups outside of the Japanese mainstream. The most solid subcultural voting blocs since the late 1970s have been the otaku... yankii... [and] gyaru.

    These marginal groups are true minorities when compared to the mainstream market, but their size is not what makes them marginal. The use of “marginal” here measures the distance from the subcultural consumer segment to both middle-class social norms as well as from the tastemakers, gatekeepers, and workers within the large companies that produce pop culture.

    In times of a substantial and profitable mainstream consumer market, large companies were justified in ignoring the yankii and otaku segments as potential customers. Moreover the culture industry had a great risk in indulging too conspicuously in these subcultures, lest they offend their core of middle-class consumers.

    So until very recently, Japan’s culture industry — dominated by educated upper-middle class counter-consumers — worked hard to appeal to Japan’s large middle class. Tokyo’s powerful consumer base and Tokyo as industry center of cultural production made the wider culture gravitate towards the specific tastes of Tokyo upper middle-class youth. This, however, has drastically changed in the last decade with the fall of middle class consumerism. Next time we will look how the otaku and yankii have taken over the vacuum left by the middle-classes as they exit markets.

  • Part Four: The Rise of Marginal Subcultures

    The drop in cultural markets has been almost perfectly pegged to the decline in incomes. Middle class consumers are buying less, and when they buy, now go for cheaper or risk-free products. Within this environment, we could expect marginal subcultures to also have curbed consumption. Yet they did not! And their steady buying into their own cultural niches has made huge changes in the tenor of Japanese pop culture.

    The otaku spend their time as avaricious collectors of goods and trading information with other otaku. In shunning away from mainstream standards of sociability, sexuality, and career success, the act of maniacal consumption becomes their raison d’être. They cannot relate with other people if not commenting upon these cultural goods. Culture — most of which must be purchased and enjoyed as object (even when it is just physical media holding content) — is the great satisfier of their deepest desires.

    The end result is that the otaku and yankii have an almost inelastic demand for their favorite goods. They must consume, no matter the economic or personal financial situation. They may move to cheaper goods, but they will always be buying something. Otherwise they lose their identity. While normal consumers curb consumption in the light of falling wages, the marginal otaku and yankii keep buying. And that means the markets built around these subcultures are relatively stable in size.

    So as the total market shrinks, the marginal groups — in their stability — are no longer minor segments but now form a respectable plurality in the market. In other words, if otaku or yankii all throw their support through a specific cultural item, that item will end up being the most supported within the wider market.

    The clearest example of this is AKB48. With the letters AKB in their name, this group of girls was unequivocally marketed towards older males based in the Akihabara otaku culture. Compared to past mass market groups such as Speed, the girls are intentionally chosen and styled to look like elementary schoolgirls and lyrically address older men with direct sexual references. (See the “cat-eared brothel” video for “Heavy Rotation” and the unambiguous “love knows no age” lyrics for “Seifuku ga jama wo suru.”)

    The mass idol group regularly has an “election” (sousenkyo) where fans try to vote their favorite girl to Number One. Buying certain AKB48 CD singles gives the fan a vote in the AKB48 election, which thus incentivizes otaku to buy multiple copies of the CD to increase their “political” power. The CD is thus no longer a means of listening to music but a way to influence the future of AKB48. This has created a legion of fans who buy dozens and hundreds of the same AKB48 CD or even 5500 copies. There are now doubts about that story’s authenticity but it basically was an exaggeration of an existing principle. Regardless, the marketing strategy of AKB48 does encourage the purchase of multiple goods, thus amplifying the buying power of nerds beyond their small numbers. This means as a consumer bloc, the AKB48 otaku fans can rival the non-otaku consumer base.

    This otaku bloc strength, as well as other niche’s dedicated buying, can be seen through the music charts. In 2010 only three artists made the Oricon best-selling singles market — AKB48 and a Johnny’s Jimusho group Arashi. (At this stage, you can almost argue that music fans of Johnny’s groups are themselves a conspicuous cult rather than a mass market phenomenon.) Only two artists taking the entire singles market is unprecedented in Japanese musical history. In the previous decade, the average number of artists in the top ten was 8.2. The best explanation is that mainstream consumers stopped buying music, even single song downloads, so the favorite acts of marginal subcultures now appear to be the most popular.

    This principle demonstrates how AKB48 became an unlikely “mainstream” phenomenon. Despite AKB48 being so clearly marketed towards a niche audience, their success in a declining market has made them perceived to be the most popular in the entire market.

    With the yankii and otaku culture being so proportionally conspicuous in the market and mainstream and avant-garde styles being so minor and invisible, the once marginal looks have a greater legitimacy for less engaged consumers who mostly just desire socially-acceptable styles.

    While otaku and yankii cultures are enjoying a new cultural influence in their deep commitment to consumption, we should not forget that these groups do not make up any kind of actual societal consensus. The masses may be consuming parts of their culture, but these groups are at best pluralities rather than majorities — dominant in the market but nowhere near 50% of tastes.

    For example, if you look at the sales numbers for the #1 single of 2010 — “Beginner” by AKB48 at 954,283 copies — this would not have been enough copies to make the top ten from the years 1991 to 2000, when the wider public bought CDs in droves. In 2001, it would have ranked in at #10 — a successful hit for a niche, but not the symbol of J-Pop for the era. The population of Japan in the last ten years has not dropped enough to make this smaller number of sales proportionally relevant — just less people are purchasing music.

  • Part Five: The Difficulty of Exporting Marginal Subcultures

    Marketing guru Kawaguchi Morinosuke’s recent book Geeky Girly Innovation: A Japanese Subculturist’s Guide to Technology and Design posits that corporate Japan needs to take more guidance from otaku and gyaru. There is an important point to this — these are now the most influential and powerful groups in Japanese pop culture and should not be ignored out of snobbery. And maybe their obsessive spirit has applicable lessons for industry management. Yet we should not be naive about this either in a wider context: the products actually made within these subcultures are increasingly losing their resonance overseas.

    What we have not seen, however, are good consumer comparisons overseas to the psychologically tortured Japanese subcultures like contemporary otaku or the yankii/gyaru. Mass market anime like Naruto and Gundam are relatively easy to export as they were built for “normal” youth. That cannot be said about moe titles that are meant to satisfy older men obsessed with two-dimensional elementary school girls. Similarly, no gyaru clothing brand has more retail stores overseas than the avant-garde Comme des Garçons, despite gyaru clothing’s huge business in Japan and CDG’s highly-limited audience. At least from what we have seen from the big subcultural moments in the last decade, the culture of Japan’s marginal pluralities is almost unexportable.

    Let’s look again at AKB48 on YouTube — a global site where anyone can watch videos from anywhere else around the world. Based on the public viewership data for “Heavy Rotation” and other AKB48 videos, the vast majority of views for AKB48 come from the group’s domestic fan base. In other words, no other country than Japan contributes to AKB48’s multi-million view count despite the fact that the videos are available worldwide and AKB48 is the overwhelmingly dominant group in Japanese pop at the moment. AKB48’s seemingly-massive popularity in Japan make them the number one favorite for J-Pop exportation. Yet no one non-Japanese is watching their videos — even in light of a “Japan Cool” wave and the popularity of YouTube all around the world. Compare AKB48’s videos to the insight map for “The Boys” by Girls Generation (SNSD) in Korea, who have had massive success in Japan and whose YouTube stats show a very wide global audience.

    In most countries with growing economies, educated upper-middle class consumers still spearhead the consumer market. They have the most disposable income and the most interest in cultural exchange. And those consumers, whether it’s Taiwan or the U.K., are the ones most likely to be willing to follow and purchase foreign cultural items.

    Currently, however, the most conspicuous Japanese culture of otaku and yankii represents value sets with little connection to affluent consumers elsewhere. Most men around the world are not wracked by such deep status insecurity that they want to live in a world where chesty two-dimensional 12 year-old girls grovel at their feet and call them big brother... Overseas consumers remain affluent, educated, and open to Japanese culture, but Japan’s pop culture complex — by increasingly catering to marginal groups (or ignoring global tastes, which is another problem altogether) — is less likely to create products relevant for them.

    This is not to say that the emergence of otaku and yankii culture is insignificant for Japan. This wave has finally given material and cultural expression to pockets of society that had a hard time voicing their experience in the past. The rich Tokyo elite enjoyed a disproportionately high influence over national culture for decades, and now the two marginal groups have taken the elite’s place in dominating the direction of pop. When it comes to “fairness” and democracy, this is the least elitist that Japanese culture has ever been. But we have replaced one kind of distortion with another, and we still should not confuse these subcultures’ tastes with being truly “mainstream.”


Wow, that's long. In short, the Japan music industry has declined because mainstream consumers stopped buying CDs. Not only that much less people are buying music, but the J-music industry is propped up by the "marginal" consumers who are fewer in number but buy multiple copies, tens, hundreds, thousands - meaning they're dependent on fewer people but a loss of mere one could mean the loss of hundreds of sales (a.k.a. "house built on stilts"). And unfortunately for them, practically "unexportable," even if they tried.
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 4:01 am Reply with quote
Mugley wrote:

reanimator wrote:
In my opinion, Japan's record industry doesn't want to get out of their own comfort zone. They're comfortable with how their products make money in their home turf. They're comfortable with their distribution system in their country.

It is frustrating to foreign fans of Japanese media, but they haven't faced major industry crisis like in the states, so there is no rush for Japanese to accept the change.


It's not a bad business model. It's why anime is as good as it is. They can aim it at only 5000 people to be a success


It's a very limited business model. Any good business knows not to put all their eggs in one basket but to broaden their sources of income, just in case a crash happens in one segment. They need variety of products: some targeted to particular segments, while some to other targets. Otherwise, they'd be totally dependent on that one type of product and could easily get wiped out. That's why businesses have different brands for different targets.


walw6pK4Alo wrote:

Except in anime, sales have never been better. There's never been so many shows breaching 10k before. Even if a decline does begin, it'll just steadily fall back to how it was in the early 00s, with more like 15-20 shows a season rather than ~35. And manga? Fuhgeddaboudit, it's enormous and the entire nation, cutting through all demographics, reads at least some form of it, a decline there would likely be imperceptible.


Actually, it has already been felt in the manga business. Like many other paper publications, manga magazine circulations have declined dramatically since their peaks in the 90's, many to less than half. More and more manga mags are ceasing publication or consolidating - there aren't as many as there used to be. J-publishers were even desperate enough to go after the 2nd-hand/used bookshops for eating into their remaining revenues - unsuccessfully trying to overturn the "first-sale doctrine" and demanding a cut of the used-book sales. They don't read manga like they used to in their train/bus commutes nowadays - they're on their phones/gadgets.
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Mohawk52



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PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 4:33 am Reply with quote
enurtsol wrote:
a whole ton of stuff
That can be said about the whole global music industry, US and UK included, not just Japan. Artists in the UK are just doing live gigs to make money and using the internet as either teasers of a single, or album.
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 4:53 am Reply with quote
Mohawk52 wrote:
enurtsol wrote:

a whole ton of stuff

That can be said about the whole global music industry, US and UK included, not just Japan. Artists in the UK are just doing live gigs to make money and using the internet as either teasers of a single, or album.


US mainstream consumers haven't stopped buying music - they just do it online or streaming. Of course, that revenue isn't yet the same level as years past; that's why musicians now rely on tours more than ever - but again, mainstream consumers still buy those tickets (they never stopped consuming). Yet, as the article states: "Japan may have become the world’s first consumer market without a mass core."
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mdo7



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PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 10:49 am Reply with quote
Enurtsol that post you put about the Great shift in Japanese culture is very interesting to read. I might put that up on my "can J-pop replicate the same success as K-pop" thread. Also that Billboard article you link, I've already did that on my first post so you didn't need put that again. But yes, what the 2 articles listed is probably the reason why J-pop never had a global breakout like K-pop. Also I did read the last part about Japan's dream to go global, I'm skeptic of that since major Japanese labels didn't embrace the digital era unlike their Korean (and Taiwanese) counterpart and as I said, the international market will be the key for J-music survival. As I said, Europe seems to have more money (Europe music market is worth more then US and Japan combined) for foreign artists. So I think J-pop artists/groups should maybe export and expand outside of Japan. Also as I did said, it's about time for J-pop artists to maybe enter Korea, I never seen J-pop doing a Korean-language album (nor a Chinese-language album) so I think this could be a cool experience for Japanese artists to try something new, I'm all for:

-AKB48, EXILE, Arashi, KAT-TUN, May J, and Yuna Ito signing up with SM Entertainment (they can do a Korean-language album, and participate in SMTown Live World Tour)

-Kyary Pamyu Pamyu with YG Entertainment. Kyary's fashion style reminds me of YG artists (2NE1, BigBang, and Lee Hi). Kyary not only do a Korean-language album. But I would like to see her Korean-language MV to have CL, G-Dragon, and maybe Lee Hi. YG artists like BigBang, 2NE1, and PSY has gotten attention around the world. If Kyary sign with YG, she'll get more attention outside of Japan/Asia. YG can set up a real world tour for Kyary as in she can go to Australia, South America, etc...

-SCANDAL can sign up with FNC Entertainment (the same agency that handle FT Island, and CNBlue). SCANDAL can do a world tour if FNC set it up like they did with CNBlue. Beside I like to hear SCANDAL sing in another language beside Japanese.

-Perfume can sign up with either Starship Entertainment (SISTAR's agency) or Cube Entertainment (that would the agency that handle BEAST, 4minute, G. NA, BTOB, Apink). If Perfume sign up with Cube Entertainment, they can take part in United Cube concert and Cube can set up a true world tour for Perfume meaning Perfume can go to South America, Australia, and places they never did a concert...

I look at both Korean and Japanese agencies. The Japanese agencies, they don't know how to globalize music and promote their artists both inside and outside of Japan. For Korean, they promote their artists really well, they know how to promote their artists outside of Asia. Korean labels make use of Youtube (hence why K-pop is now popular outside of Asia), they embrace digital music hence why I can find a huge catalog of K-pop on Itunes. I can find a lot of K-drama OSTs on Itunes done by K-pop artists. Korea rely on the international market unlike Japan. This is why K-pop concerts outside of Korea and outside of Asia is becoming more frequent. I've never seen a J-pop concerts outside of Japan as big as SMTown Live World Tour, United Cube, YGFamily, JYP Nation, or Music Bank World Tour. A-nation never went outside of Japan. So how can J-pop artists get more exposure outside of Japan and outside of Asia, tap into the Korean music market. When J-pop artists make use of the Korean market, they'll get a lot of attention outside of Asia and their Korean labels/agencies can promote these J-pop artists outside of Japan and outside of Asia. As of now, I don't know if Japan are willing to catch up to their Korean counterpart, but Taiwanese Pop I think may catch up to their Korean counterpart soon.
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omoikane



Joined: 03 Oct 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 15, 2013 5:21 pm Reply with quote
mdo7 wrote:

If that was true then Japan's digital music sales would've been up already like on the same level as Korea and Taiwan's digital music sales.

Why do you say that? The market for PMP and cell phones, carriers, etc are different in TW and KR than in Japan. The consumer trends for physical goods are also different for those countries.

I am almost tempted to ask you to elaborate this because you may see something I'm missing, but I'm afraid that you'll just pull out some kind of copypasta bandwagon that misses the point I'm trying to address.
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