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It’s hard to say whether 2004 was a good year or a bad year for the Japanese music community.
Numbers-wise, it was hardly a banner year. One key indicator of the Japanese music market’s health is the shipments data released by the Recording Industry Association of Japan, which represents 42 Japanese record companies. They account for more than 90% of the recorded music sold in Japan.
Shipments (including, CDs, music videos and DVDs) by RIAJ members in 2004 were worth a total of 581.5 billion ($5.7 billion) in wholesale terms, according to a preliminary estimate made by the association at the end of the year.
That marked a 1% increase over 2003. But that slight increase was due to strong sales of music-oriented visual product, especially music DVDs. Sales of music CDs continue to fall. In fact, music sales in Japan have been on the slide since the peak year of 1998.
The RIAJ will release net sales data for 2004 in a few weeks.
One worrying sign for the industry was that for the first time in 15 years, there wasn’t even one million-selling selling single in Japan last year. The year’s top-selling single was male vocalist Ken Hirai’s “Hitomi wo Tojite (With My Eyes Closed),” which had sold just over 840,000 copies as of mid-December.
Sony Records says it expects the single, which was used as the theme song of the movie Sekai no Chushin de Ai wo Sakebu, to crack the 1-million-sales barrier, since it’s been selling steadily following its release in May.
Other J-pop acts to do well in 2004 included Orange Range, a new band from Okinawa’s vibrant music scene, who had a big summer single with the relentless catchy “Locolotion” as well as with the pop ballad “Hana.” Both of those songs made it into Oricon magazine’s yearend top 10, confirming Orange Range’s status as the most successful new J-pop act in 2004. Two newcomer vocalists, Ayaka Hirahara and Kyogo Kawaguchi, also scored hits last year, proving that despite the industry’s doldrums, there’s still a wealth of musical talent in Japan.
Last year began on a positive note with the South Korean government's lifting of its last restrictions on Japanese cultural products, including CDs containing songs with Japanese lyrics.
Japanese record companies’ hopes that South Korea would become a new and lucrative market for J-pop were tempered by the fact that music sales in that country have fallen by roughly 50% in the past three years, largely because of widespread file-sharing (South Korea has one of the world’s highest broadband penetration rates).
Labels here were worried that Japanese-repertoire CDs pressed in Korea and other parts of Asia where CD prices are lower would find their way into Japan as cheap imports, undercutting sales of domestically-pressed CDs.
The led the RIAJ to increase its efforts to get the Japanese government to pass an “import-right” amendment to the Copyright Law. The campaign was opposed by retailers, well-known music critics and ordinary music fans.
Retailers feared the import would give too much power to labels, which already have the right to set retail prices. Many music fans believed that all imports could be blocked if the amendment were passed.
In theory, that could happen: having the import right means labels can prevent the import of any CD they have the right to license for release in Japan, including CDs by domestic artists.
The Japanese Diet (parliament) sided with the industry and on June 3 approved the amendment, which went into effect January 1.
In August, superstar vocalist Ayumi Hamasaki demonstrated how much clout she has in the music biz when she backed Avex senior managing director MD Masato “Max” Matsuura in a power struggle with Avex chairman/CEO Tom Yoda. When “Ayu” announced that she might leave Avex if Matsuuura – who had discovered her and overseen her career – left the company, Avex’s stock price fell 16%.
Yoda saw the writing on the wall and agreed to move upstairs to the largely ceremonial post of honorary chairman, and Matsuura took over as president of Avex. Hamasaki and other artists who’d threatened to leave the label are still with Avex, by the way.
Yoda’s ouster was followed by Avex’s decision, along with Sony, to phase out copy-controlled CDs, which had proved massively unpopular with music fans. Other Japanese labels are expected to follow suit.
The next big news on the music-biz scene was Microsoft’s Oct. 20 launch of the Japanese edition of its MSN Music service with a selection of some 50,000 tracks provided by 10 major Japanese labels. Meanwhile, Apple’s online iTunes Music Store has yet to launch in Japan despite booming sales of the company’s iPod portable music player.
On the music front, 2004 was both a good year and a bad year for Hikaru Utada. Hikki’s English-language album, Exodus, had an initial shipment in Japan of more than 1.3 million copies – the most for any English-language album ever in Japan. But Exodus bombed in the United States, where it was released by Island Def Jam on October 5. The album only made it to No. 160 on the Billboard 200 album chart. A remix of the single "Devil Inside" reached No. 1 on the Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart, which the Japanese media (predictably) played up with headlines of the “Utada scores No. 1 hit in U.S.” variety.
Possible reasons for the failure of Exodus in the U.S. include the media's concentration on the tightly-fought U.S. presidential election; the fact that Lyor Cohen, who had lent the Exodus project his personal support, was no longer head honcho at Island Def Jam; and that Utada didn’t do any live shows in the U.S. to promote the record.
The album’s somewhat cold, electronic textures may also have turned off American music fans, not to mention lyrics such as “You’re Easy Breezy and I’m Japaneesy.”
J-pop acts that did have an impact overseas in 2004 were those that took advantage of the increasingly important anime-J-pop connection. The 2004 edition of Pacific Media Expo (PMX), an Asian pop-culture event held each May in Anaheim, Ca., featured live performances by T.M. Revolution and vocalist Nami Tamaki, while L’Arc-en-Ciel made its U.S debut on July 31 in front of an audience of 12,000 at the Otakon anime convention in Baltimore, Md.
And in November the Cartoon Network channel launched Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, an animated series chronicling the fictional adventures of Epic Japan J-pop duo Puffy (who are known as Puffy AmiYumi in the U.S. to avoid “confusion” with Sean “Puffy” Combs).
A footnote to last week’s feature about NHK’s Kohaku Uta Gassen (Red and White Song Contest): according to ratings from Video Research, the New Year’s Eve music spectacular was watched by just 40% of Japanese TV viewers, a far cry from its heyday in the ’60s, when some 80% of Japanese households tuned in to the show. And in case you were wondering, the red team won.
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