« Rethinking the UTADA Conspiracy | Main | The Decline of the Japanese Music Market, Part Two »

October 17, 2004

The Decline of the Japanese Music Market, Part One

I recently picked up a copy of "yoku wakaru - ongaku gyoukai" (The Easy to Understand Guide to the Music Business") at my library, and I have learned a lot about the Japanese music market from just a quick reading of the overview. The library's copy was from 1999, which is right before sales started plummeting, so I ordered the newest printing from 2003 to read their explanations of the five-year decline. Things I have learned so far in comparing the two editions:

1. The Increase of Million-Sellers in the 90s

millionsellers.jpg
Graph of Singles and Albums Selling Over 1 million copies (from RIAJ data)

Starting in 1993, the Jpop market started producing an ever growing number of singles and albums that broke the million copy mark. This peaked around 1998, and the number of hugely-selling singles in particular has been in heavy decline. In 2002, there was only 1 single that broke the million mark - compared with 20 in 1998 - and it was SMAP, who aren't really a music group as much as a national institution.

This signals that the music market was getting bigger, but the purchases of those new consumers clumped towards mass-market-directed releases that piggybacked on other media through tie-up with trendy dramas, commericals, and anime theme songs.

2. The Change in the 90s from a Male to a Female Market

Until the 1990s, the eternal question in the backrooms of record companies was, how do we get girls to consume music? The market was essentially comprised of mostly male music "fans." With the rise of Amuro Namie and Hamazaki Ayumi etc however, female fans flocked into the market, and the influx of female consumers led to the million-seller era. By the late 90s, the market had become almost 65% female.

Record companies like female customers since they are (supposedly):

a) More sensitive to trends
b) More influenced by the mass media
c) Less interested in music itself (so do not have any preferences that would get in the way of new product offerings)

Essentially, Japanese females are not really "music fans" and bought records because they were part of larger culture movements, whether those be drama viewership ("Long Vacation") or teenage subcultures (kogyaru etc.)

So, the music market was basically oversatured with the female "non-music fan" contigent, and when the mega-trends like the amuraa and the gyaru disappeared in the late 90s with nothing to take their place, the record companies had a hard time producing anything relevant to a bunch of less-wealthy girls who don't particularly like music anyway.

And when they geared the market towards the high-risk game of trying to produce megahits, they took the liberty of removing all pesky musical content, and thus, alienated all the true music fans, who all went off into their own less profitable sub-genres.

So, the market is shrinking, but only because they are losing people who should have never been music consumers in the first place.

As a side note, I find it interesting that right when the idol commodity-driven Japanese market started to decline in the late 90s, the American idol-commodity market started going into overdrive.

Posted by marxy at October 17, 2004 11:53 PM