CD-Loving Japan Resists Move to Online Music
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
And, well, I'm a bit missing these times when you could exchange CDs with your friends and all that kind of stuff. But dismiss it. However ability to not have CD-ROM in your notebook is major bonus. And size of portable music players as well.
I wonder if paper books are as expensive in Japan as in the western countries.
The answer is 3 years of music enjoyment.
Honestly, this seems like a terrible example - I don't think anybody pays for spotify on the basis that they will have the music forever, it's very explicitly a rental service. Instead, people pay because it's the most convenient (including being cheap) way to access the music they want.
> While I'm not a CD junkie, I find myself clinging to the model you mention, because I am not eager to hand over control to a company that continually required me to pay
This doesn't really make sense either. If you don't like rental services, don't pay for them, buy the albums just like you always did - it's easy to buy DRM free mp3s nowadays.
> but it certainly isn't cheap
I'll admit, I was speaking more from the perspective of listening to a lot of music. For instance, the combined purchase value of all the albums in my spotify playlists far exceeds the total amount I ever spent on spotify, though I haven't used it for a while. I'm sure there are many people for whom this is true, even if they aren't a large proportion of the whole population.
In general you're right of course, 'cheap' is a matter of perspective. Spotify is not cheap for everyone, but it is potentially cheap for plenty of people. I still don't see the problem with this.
And, too, the collaborative experience that Spotify brings. I neglected to consider that. While very little money goes to the artists, the "sharing" aspect of Spotify is something that many people value and gladly pay for. Personally, I find that aspect too involved (I'm an albums person, not a playlist person) but from a marketing perspective this might be better for artists than physical media. I'm still too possessive for the rent-a-song method. What happened when I sign on and the music I like it out of license? Much better for me to have it as near to me as possible.
What prevents someone from doing the same thing with Spotify? Play music on one device, record it on another using audio patch cables if needed. Or maybe it isn't even that hard, just record the audio signal right out of the audio card in your PC. Is this prevented somehow?
Also, I guess I'm increasingly in the minority, but I really enjoy reading liner notes.
Fortunately, I haven't had to rerip in a while. And if I really wanted to throw in the towel, services like Murfie exist that will take your collection and rip for you in a variety of formats. But, having physical CDs really doesn't bother me either.
However, if I want an album, I always buy and rip the CD to WAV/PCM. It's the real, unprocessed, uncompressed (lossy or lossless) bits of the CD, and I know of no other way to get those.
In my opinion, unless you have the PCM of the cd track, you will buy or rip that song again. This way you have it for good.
By the way, there's no reason to keep stuff around as WAV/PCM, it'll be just as lossless as FLACs (and thus can be further transcoded with no issue whatsoever) and you can actually tag the stuff like that too.
However, there are other ways to get those as well. Bandcamp offers downloads in flac, mp3, ogg, and others. If the album isn't on bandcamp, or some other site that offers flac copies, then you can illegally pirate flac content from some-of-a-few audiophile websites.
I'm quite a fan of bandcamp and I'd highly recommend seeing if you can find good music there.
Again, having the WAV file means I never have to touch that music again. Ever.
While just about any device can play .wav, many devices have so little storage that I find myself ripping on flac, the re-encoding to something lossy and lower bit rate to get a reasonable amount onto a mobile device.
Why would that be? libFLAC has IRIX support since ~2002, and computational power certainly isn't the issue, there used to be (and may still be) devices with <100MHz ARM chips doing real-time FLAC decoding in software (using just libFLAC).
Amazon will sell me a CD at the same price you pay, plus shipping.
Apple will sell me audio files, at a 30% premium over what they charge you.
The main thing that's crazy is really the digital distribution systems available to us. If all we have is some DRM-crippled products, then you can't actually buy things digitally - merely rent them for an undefined period of time. Luckily, there are at least some things you can buy without DRM (music does pretty decently in this regard, games somewhat), but on the whole the situation is rather gloomy (especially with anything video). And while I do like the catalog rental model that services like Netflix offer with their subscriptions, at the very least I would like to be able to digitally buy the things I really like, which is flat-out impossible in many cases.
Nearly all the music I've bought online in the last 5 years has been DRM free which means I can play it on any device and nobody can delete it. I bought it, I own it. It's not rented.As for sharing with you friends that doesn't happen very often but mainly I think because it's easier for them to just get their own copy than meet me to borrow mine. When it was more common to borrow media from people that was not only because it was free but because they would have to travel to a shop, and if that shop didn't have it, travel to another and another until they found it. Now they can own it in seconds.
I've also moved a lot so carrying a couple hard drives is much easier than boxes and boxes of books and cds - let alone people that collect vinyl.
A lot of e-books are either half off or more than their physical counterparts. Also when you're buying technical books, their electronic versions will get updated and you buy and get access to e-books in draft form which is pretty useful for bleeding edge tech.
It's also pretty cool to be able to fit your entire library in your pocket.
Everything said, I still would never buy the digital version of art books and coffee table books and I still own the physical copies of the books I really like. I tend to buy digital copies more as an accessory.
* A significant percentage of music is still only available on CD, and not in digital media. Until recently, music from one company (say Sony) was only available from their digital music store, which had their own player app with their own DRM. These things create significant inconvenience to the consumers, hindering the adoption of digital music.
* The music industry in Japan came up with a brilliant business model that enabled them to sell the same CD multiple times to the same consumer, basically by bundling a ticket to each CD. Sometimes a single ticket grants you one vote, sometimes you get one piece of (say 12) tickets randomly and you need to complete all 12 pieces to get something. This forces loyal fans to buy 10s and sometimes 100s of the same CD.
It's not like people are carrying around portable CD players any more, so these factors obviously creates a rapidly diminishing music fan base. I still hope that eventually the decline in the CD business will force the industry to wholy embrace the digial music, but I'm not holding my breath.
I don't understand what you mean by tickets and votes. It sounds really interesting, and I'd be grateful if you could elaborate.
"The group has publicized special events to choose the promotional and recording lineups for some of its singles.[191] In 2009, the concept of sōsenkyo (総選挙?, "general elections") was introduced.[19] To obtain a ballot, voters must purchase the group's latest "election single."[192] Members who receive the most votes will participate in the recording of AKB48's next single[19] and are heavily promoted,[5] with the top vote-getter the centerpiece of the group's live performances.[191][192] Votes in the 2011 election exceeded one million, and the single "Everyday, Katyusha" (which contained a ballot for the election) set a Japanese record for weekly sales of a CD single.[193] The 2012 election had nearly 1.4 million votes,[191] and the 2013 election had 2.6 million votes.[194] Fans have reportedly bought hundreds (or thousands) of copies of singles to vote for their favorite members."
0: https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/526459191826079744
1: http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/6304336...
[1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/07/01/language/voting-...
[2] http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/05/22/akb48-fan-shows-his-lo...
The tickets usually refer to hand-shake events where you can meet and shake hands with members of the group.
Another hook is including different DVDs in each of several versions of a single, for example Making of videos, close up versions of the video, dance versions, etc. I have seen up to 6 different versions of the same single.
The same phenomenon is going on for ebooks, where it's still heavily balkanised but it's clear the eventually most of the stores will go down and ignoring the biggest players (Amazon I guess ?) won't make sense.
I think the bets are still off concerning DVD/BD distribution, as they are still used to balance the profits on TV series for instance. On this front it's funny to see a very small number of production companies tipping their toes in crowdfunding (and being pushed to use kickstarter for instance...) to see if it would work for them.
Also japanese CDs generally bundle lots of extras, it's not just a plastic disc and a 1-ply cover art, they tend to get extensive liner notes, DVD extras, event tickets (e.g. "hand shake" tickets in jpop CDs), etc… And really neat collector boxsets tend to be much more common and normal than in the west e.g. this: http://aap.blackaris2001.org/AlienHead/Alien25thAnniversaryC... was their Alien 25th Anniversary Collection boxset
0: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-appeal-in-japan-is-turning-th...
Would you please expand upon that? How could you do that? What kind of ebook format allows that? That really would be neat.
Cellphone novels are a full-fledged literary genre in japan. As is oft noted, the future is not evenly distributed.
What makes it all even more annoying is that it's not like the artists would be completely unaware of digital music services - they post samples to Soundcloud, and some might even sell an album or two on Bandcamp, but the vast majority of everything is just completely unavailable in any legitimate digital manner. Of course, most of it is available via less legitimate sources, but that has its obvious downsides, like not having any idea when new releases will actually become available. Just a week ago an album I'm really looking forward to[1] was released physically during a doujin event. If that was available on Bandcamp, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but since it's not, I'm forced to wait for who knows how long before I even get to listen to the damn thing proper.
It might be a psychological hack to cause more people to become superfans by drawing out the obsessive compulsive desire to collect rare artifacts (which happen to be music CDs in this case).
So? Music is not just about musicianship or sound, and art even less so.
It's an experience, and how you approach that experience is equally important.
That's also why Joe Satriani or some poser like Yngwie Malmsteen are no "better" than someone like BB King, nor is a pristeen sounding acid-jazz Blueray better than some crappy sounding Alan Lomax recordings.
>It might be a psychological hack to cause more people to become superfans by drawing out the obsessive compulsive desire to collect rare artifacts (which happen to be music CDs in this case).
Even more common is the psychological compulsion to just download or buy stuff and amass a huge collection which you're never gonna hear more than 1-2 times...
Isn't it a bit circular if the best music in your or my opinion becomes the music that we most fervently collect or go to concerts of (possibly because friends do), and then we continue fervently collecting it or attending concerts because "it's the best music"?
They still commonly use fax machines http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...
And at least when I was there in 2007 they were still very cash-based and many atms would be inaccessible after midnight (except in 7-11 stores?)
From the article: "The Japanese government’s Cabinet Office said that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011. "
I would be surprised if 10% of private homes in the USA have a fax machine.
A fax machine (or a landline for that matter) in the home isn't for me, but they're still moving down the development curve, releasing new features, improving quality and lowering costs.
I have heard on more than one occasion the popularity of the consumer-level fax is tied to the importance placed on skillful handwriting. I have pointed out that there was no way the skillfulness of one's handwriting could be relayed via fax, and noted that there was a certain twisted irony in the fact that a once-new technology remained popular because of something so traditional.
In the last 12 months I have required to use a fax machine about four times here. Twice for a group booking (baseball, riverboat cruise), and twice to send stuff back to my own government in Australia. In all these cases a scanned PDF was confirmed not acceptable.
And does this have any relation with Japan's reported affinity toward fax machines? (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...)
> Yuichiro Sugahara learned the hard way about his country’s deep attachment to the fax machine, which the nation popularized in the 1980s. A decade ago, he tried to modernize his family-run company, which delivers traditional bento lunchboxes, by taking orders online. Sales quickly plummeted.
Today, his company, Tamagoya, is thriving with the hiss and beep of thousands of orders pouring in every morning, most by fax, many with minutely detailed handwritten requests like “go light on the batter in the fried chicken” or “add an extra hard-boiled egg.”
“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” said Mr. Sugahara, 43.
I would say that they're both lightyears behind Microsoft/Xbox.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret...
"The discussion started off well enough and covered off our experiences with the hardware and (slow) toolchain and then we steered them towards discussing when the online features might be available. We were told that the features, and the OS updates to support them, would be available before the hardware launch, but only just. There were apparently issues with setting up a large networking infrastructure to rival Sony and Microsoft that they hadn't envisaged.
This was surprising to hear, as we would have thought that they had plenty of time to work on these features as it had been announced months before, so we probed a little deeper and asked how certain scenarios might work with the Mii friends and networking, all the time referencing how Xbox Live and PSN achieve the same thing. At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them? My only thought after this call was that they were struggling - badly - with the networking side as it was far more complicated than they anticipated. They were trying to play catch-up with the rival systems, but without the years of experience to back it up.
As promised, (just) before the worldwide launch we received the final networking features that we required for our game along with an OS update for the development kits that would allow us to test. So we patched up our code and tried to start testing our game.
First up we had to flash the kits to the retail mode that had the Mii and network features. This was a very complicated manual process that left the consoles in a halfway state. In the retail mode we could test our features and ensure that they worked as expected, which would be a requirement for getting through Nintendo certification, but in this mode the debugging capabilities were limited. So we could see when things went wrong, but we couldn't fully debug to find out why. As developers, we had to make a choice and hope that any issues that you found were due to the (untested) OS code and wouldn't happen in the final retail environment. What should have been simple tasks were long-winded and error prone. Simple things like sending a friends request to another user were not supported in the OS, so you had to boot a separate program on the console manually, via a debug menu, so that you could send one. But if any error occurred there was no way to debug why it had failed, it just failed.
We started to ask questions about how they could possibly launch the console, which was a matter of weeks away, with a partially developed OS. How were they going to get the OS onto all of the consoles that had been manufactured up to that point? Was it just that we got it late, but they had pushed it into the production line earlier?
Launch day came around and the answer became clear: Nintendo was late - very late - with its network systems. In fact, the only way to access their systems fully was to download a big patch on day one that added all these missing components. Without that patch a lot of the release titles would have been only semi-functional."
No surprise there. Giri is still a very real thing in Japan, tho it is fading slowly with the generations.
They just tend to be cell phone based.
It's gotten so bad that they had to pass a law preventing a particularly exploitive in app purchase practice:
http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/05/18/japan-officially-...
I remember filling my shelves with CD cases, and I remember noticing that I wasn't listening to my full range of music because of the friction of having to switch physical discs. Then my friend and I each bought a 400-disc carousel player [0]. That thing was magical - suddenly we could listen to any song we had ever bought at the press of a few buttons. I remember using Access to make a database of all my music, so I could easily listen to anything I wanted to.
Around 2006 I bought a 30GB ipod, and I methodically ripped every CD in the 400-disc changer, which I had completely filled. I remember writing to my friend and telling him that every song in that changer was now in my pocket. It was another revolution in making all my music available with even less friction.
Fast forward to today, and what do I have? I'm still listening to music on my 2006 ipod. I'm stuck there because I don't use itunes anymore, but my old ipod still works. I haven't made the time to update my approach to organizing music. I had a dream just last night that my ipod burned up, and I had to figure out a new way to listen to music.
I'll dedicate some time in the next year or two to organize my music outside of itunes. I still have all my old CDs, so I could rip them again if there's reason to do so.
Music has been changing formats for the last 100+ years. It's a bit of work to keep up with the changing formats, but I am always grateful that we have easy access to our entire collection of music at the touch of a few buttons.
Edit: I also lived in NYC in the 90's, and I miss going to Tower Records and HMV and getting lost in there for hours at a time.
[0] http://content.abt.com/image.php/big_cdpcx455.jpg?image=/ima...
1. CD's are much more expensive in Japan than in other parts of the world - typical prices are in the $25-30 USD range. The ~$1/song doesn't really work over there.
2. Japan has (or had) CD rental stores. Like the Blockbuster of yore, you can go and rent a CD, take it home, copy it to minidisc (this is late 90's japan, remember!), then listen to it forever. This was quite common - one of my roomies had a case of about 100 minidiscs that were all copies from rentals.
So, the market is really different over there - minidisc and laserdisc both caught on to significant degrees, whereas it didn't anywhere else.
Their national broadcaster has a research lab into television technologies, it's figuring out how to encode 8K for terrestrial broadcast, among other amazingly cool projects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Science_%26_Technology_Rese...
On the flip side, their national broadcaster has been really slow to invest in internet streaming, or push online access, with 60% of weekly Japanese NHK news consumers claiming they didn't even know NHK had a website: http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/pdf/10_no8_07.pd...
Maybe CDs vs. streaming is in some ways Sony vs. Apple, and there are factors like national pride, domestic market control, and local branding dominance that play a role in the choice of technologies, rather than just products. Even so, always fascinating to see weird exogenous factors (beyond performance / capacity / etc.) tip a market.
I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to have the best of both worlds here? What if there was a service that could act as a depository of your physical media? You could mail them boxes of stuff, which they'd keep someplace like a warehouse in Reno. The service could require that you use special packaging to reduce their costs. You'd also be able to request digitized versions, up to some fixed number of requests per month. Of course, the types of media would be limited. I would start with CDs, DVDs, and books.
No one else had been able to pull it off before - the record industry knew it was a different businsss model, and this was one of Steve's massive business coups. Music was being shared as files online - this gave businesses a legal way to compete with that. Apple launched the whole "1000 songs in your pocket" industry.
Today, for most people, it's no longer about your song collection. Tower Records has closed along with and the disruption of the physical delivery continues apace, led by Amazon and its massive consumer power. The future is squeezing of publishers, which will need to find their own ways to collectivize. But this is the macroeconomics of it. I want to mention the social impact on the individual level.
I no longer download songs to iTunes, or rip them, except for the times I go traveling or on a cruise. Music has become a social phenomenon, and for that it is better to have a free legal music source IN THE CLOUD. I just had a house party and we used a simple web app I created a few years back called YouMixer (http://youmixer.com) that uses the YouTube API as a source of free, legal music and lets everyone contribute to the playlist.
Facebook has since broke the login, and I have to recode that app. But creating a music mix works, everyone gets to add their songs and hear them at the party, and I think this is the future. Your preferences and songs following you where you go, so listenng to music is a social event unconstrained by downloading collections. I believe paintings will follow the same pattern in the next 5-10 years, and new formats for players - both audio and visual - will appear which will help usher in this social phenomenon.
* A lot of music I buy actually ends up being the same price for the CD.
* I can still rip it at any quality I like into any format I like (I use abcde to rip to ogg). I keep all my music on Dropbox and sync it between my phone, home machines and work machine.
* I'm a collector and I like displaying my music in my house, and guests sometimes like to have a browse and borrow them.
Japanese play CDS only? (3)
I'm gratified to find out that the surface was more accurate than I realised :)
"Not pirating like foreigners" is actually a source of pride for some groups. Japanese anime otaku and Japanese adult video enthusiasts have respectively criticised their (self-styled) western counterparts who tend to pirate the anime and adult movies instead of supporting the creators.
The companies behind the anime (And there are generally a lot - not just the production studio) invest the money to produce it, /and/ to book the slot that it airs on. Anime ratings aren't great for the vast majority of shows, and the TV networks would rather just pump out a cheap talk show or similar and get better ratings if they're left in charge of things.
So, now you've got the show produced, have booked a time slot, and start airing your show. You're not making money off of the advertising. Where do you make your money, then?
Merchandising and dvd/blu-ray sales. So this results in the ridiculous quantity of merchandise anime series have.
And then the blu-ray/dvd sales. These are what really drives the market, and it's completely ludicrous. A season will be released piece by piece, 2-4 episodes at a time, for $30-$60 each. Buying a copy of both seasons of Fate/Zero, for example, would cost you $591
The sales of these pieced out dvds/blu-rays basically determine the life of a show - at a time where only the domestic market is purchasing. Streams like Crunchyroll have basically zero bearing on how the committees running the show view it's success. If domestic sales are good, a sequel is likely to be made. If domestic sales are bad, even if it is an absolute runaway hit elsewhere (and I mean fairly universally - something could sell well in China, the US, etc etc etc and if it didn't do well in Japan, it's still dead)
Add all of that together, and there's really zero incentive for westerners (Or any non-Japanese market) to not pirate anime, outside of the whole "contributing financially [in an extremely diminished capacity] to the people who made the product you enjoy".
About the only time they take notice of international success at all is when it's a ridiculous runaway, like Bleach, Naruto, etc.