Utada's 'Heart Station' is her last Japanese album from 2008 - but that's still selling for ¥2150 = £18!! Probably a lot of fans decided to buy the DVD limited version too - which is £48!Įven older albums are crazy-expensive.
and this isn't an obscure artist - this is a #1 selling album. The Yen is pretty strong against the pound, but still £23.40 is a very high price for a simple CD album. Perfume 'JPN' - ¥2800 in Amazon Japan = £23.40Ĭoldplay 'Mylo Xyloto' - £8.99 in Amazon UK = ¥1076 (actually ¥1288 in Amazon jp) I was surprised at the high cost so I checked to see if I was paying a lot just to export - but no, the album is expensive in Japan too. I'm not a massive Coldplay fan, but I like Perfume, and I just bought 'JPN'. Perfume's 'JPN' and Coldplay's 'Mylo Xyloto'. Record companies know that if prices went up too much, people would start torrenting more. Internet record stalls (Amazon, Play etc.) over here have forced CD prices down, and the competition of digital downloads has done the same. All record companies in Japan who has contract with Apple for iTunes says that iTunes is their lifeline, since most of profits comes from iTunes)Īlchemistmuffin - whatever the Japanese labels are doing, the problem is that the Japanese people seem to be happy to go with it.
#Avex trax playboy apple free
(Unless Apple plays hardball, and threatens to shut down iTunes store completely unless record company comply with Apple requiring DRM free songs and allow use of iTunes match. Until their attitude change in regards to DRM and piracy, Apple will never introduce iTunes match and iTunes in the cloud for music in Japan. And they believe that iTunes match and iTunes in the cloud actually encourages piracy. Almost all record companies in Japan are still stuck in the stone age regarding copy control and wants DRM in their songs. Avex was the first one to say yes, and for them, it was kind of experiment to sell songs at lot lower price then the competition, as long as there was some form of DRM.Īnd rest is history. But more importantly, Apple kinda forced record companies to abandon the copy control discs, when they started asking record companies about joining iTunes store. Well, thanks to explosive adoption of iPod over there, and many users complaining that copy control CD actually damaging the disc drive on their stereos and computers (don't know how that happened, but there are actually stories regarding that), all record companies in Japan have switched back to regular audio CD. The worst offender of Copy Control CD was Sony, which actually charged users to rip the songs from CD if they do it the second and third and subsequent times. And the ripped files were encrypted with DRM, to be played on that computer only. Before iTunes store was launched, all the music CD that were launched were encrypted with Copy Control, so when users puts in the disc into the PC, instead of Audio CD portion being played out, it goes straight to Data CD portion, and require users to authorize the computer to rip the songs to computer first. Reason: Japanease Record Labels are very, very conservative about piracy.īack in 2005, when iTunes store launched in Japan, many record labels in Japan was against iTunes store in general, due to very lax nature of FairPlay DRM. I have a bad feeling iTunes match is never going to come to Japan, along with iTunes in the Cloud, or allow their songs to be in store which has iTunes match and iTunes in the cloud. Why change, when you can still make money the old-school way? they don't do any digital downloads at all, and they can easily sell 250k CDs in a week when they release a new album.
I don't think this is going to change any time soon. and unfortunately it's the same story if you want to buy CDs: Japanese albums on YesAsia cost $$$$ ($37 for Jasmine/Gold) while there are eBay sellers selling pretty much every K-Pop release for half that ($18+$3 shipping for 2NE1 first album). I do try to buy all my music legitimately. that seem to have pretty much every release there. Contrast that with well known K-Pop artists like T-Ara, Kara, SNSD, 2NE1 etc. In the UK iTunes store we have Ayu's 'Guilty' album, her 'ayu-mix' and all her videos, but nothing else.
#Avex trax playboy apple series
This second series of articles has been fascinating - with the author discussing how Japan's pop culture is now aimed at groups in society that really have no equivalent in the West - and as a result is becoming much less marketable internationally. The Internet' and ' The Great Shift in Japanese Pop Culture'. There are been some interesting blog posts recently on the Neojapanisme blog concerning ' The Fear of. Unfortunately Japanese record labels don't seem to 'get' the internet, and most artists consider only their home market.
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