Jpop to be mainstream in America? Probably not.

News has broken recently about Japanese record companies having meetings with their American counterparts talking about the possibilities of having some Japanese artists cross over into America's music market, and the focus seems to be on some groups that may already have a foot-in-the-door, so to speak, through the association of doing songs for anime series. This spawns because the Japanese music industry is dissatisfied with their mere 46 billion (sic) yen a year earnings and are looking to expand this number. (Have they checked with the other world music markets to compare?) One of the main ideas behind this is that, basically, since anime and video games have already broken the barrier of going overseas and being widely accepted or thrust into the mainstream of culture, that music should be the next successor to this trend. I'd beg to differ, given the large differences between the industries between the two countries, and even more so, the consumers in their prospective markets.


First of all, this idea has already been attempted at short length in America through a small company called Tofu Records. In the mid-2000's, Tofu was bringing over artists who were popular among the anime crowd because they did a lot of anime theme songs, etc. and released those groups' real albums for sale in America for about the regular American CD price, not $35 a pop, like the average imported Jpop CD. This was an interesting strategy, but I'm sure they were very unable to get a hold of a lot of the artists from avex and other larger production companies that dominate Japan's market, but I think the biggest they got were PUFFY (AmiYumi, to those who know their American handle..) and T.M. Revolution. The rest was mostly indie rock/visual artists or just re-releases of anime soundtracks. Hell, they even paid a lot for PUFFY to come over and do lots of promotion and tours in America, which definitely helped, on top of happening around the same time that they had their show on Cartoon Network, so if I really had to take a wager, I'd say they were probably the biggest attempt at actually breaking an artist into the US market from Japan so far, and it wasn't done at the expense of changing everything about their sound and image to fit a more American style, they just let them be who they are. The group was still far from achieving anywhere near mainstream success here and were largely, by gathered opinion, treated fairly as a novelty or passing fad and aren't spoken of much in America anymore.

We also should consider just how different releasing and promotion structure is for the music industry between the two countries. The US rarely releases single CDs, and even if they do, they're very hard to get a hold of, and albums only normally come out for a group every 2-4 years, where some Jpop artists have a single every 2 months and an album every year that is mostly composed of their previous singles since the last album with a few album-only tracks included. If there was someone trying to do what Jpop artists do over there in our market, I couldn't see people being very happy with that. If they only released the albums of Jpop groups here, most of us fans would probably get a little annoyed because they're not technically keeping up with the material they're releasing in their native land, but honestly, I don't know how they could keep up without releasing singles, which would never happen. Beside the factor of singles just not being an accepted format in the US, this would also mean they'd have to press however many CDs for each single release, when there is probably not much of a market for them, in all honesty, so the money to be invested would likely not be ruled as justified if it came down to a business discussion.

On the subject of promotion and marketing of music in America, we'll use some recent and long-standing examples of successful music promotion in the US in the context of if it were a Japanese artist. Over time, most of the only successful promotion of music has come from the time-tested methods of touring, selling merchandise on tour, appearing on radio and TV shows, etc., but in recent years a few new players have come into the fray, those being internet promotion of many kinds, digital downloads of the same kinds, and advertising through video games, and for the sake of more specific context, games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

While Rock Band developer, Harmonix, has been in talks to create a Japanese-centric version of their hyper-popular rhythm game for their audiences over there, this also poses the question of whether or not this could be beneficial in helping to promote some of these "crossover" artists in this country through downloadable songs or specialized mini-game releases that center around a certain genre or theme. The only reason so much faith is put into this method is that there have been proven, publicly announced results from this, showing that when an artist's music is in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, some record companies have seen nearly a 300% increase in sales of those artists' songs through iTunes and physical CD sales. Things like this could be done right if they're kept on a small enough scale, but aiming for foreign music to be truly "mainstream" in America is just setting itself up for failure. Foreign music outside of Europe's will always be a niche market here, but if they market this directly at that niche market in the right ways, it could be successful in its own way.

When more specifically talking of bands from Japan touring in the US, it brings a few concerns to mind. The fact that touring the US is very different from touring Japan, where you'd have to go for longer periods of time with only traveling, have to have a live band to have credibility to US audiences (many, many Japanese concerts only sing and dance to a karaoke track,) be much farther away from home, and other things of this nature would certainly be a shock to most of the groups who have toured Japan before. Some of the talks also involved specifically certain younger girl groups with girls from ages 13-16, where if you think of little girls going off to do months of touring at a time in a foreign country, there's a laundry list of potential disasters that could happen. These girls are also often still in school or studying while they're working their entertainment job, and it is quite a norm of their industry to be working on promotion and various other projects almost every day of the week and every week of the month, etc., so I imagine the management companies would be fairly reluctant to let them just take off half a year to go tour a foreign country with no guarantees for selling concert tickets in the first place when they could just stay at home and have a constant stream of income.

Price and distribution is another factor in the question of whether this might be "worth it," in business terms. As anyone who has bought authentic Japanese CDs before should know, the prices are pretty hard to swallow, even taking into consideration import or shipping prices in the mix. With my past knowledge of how their industry works, this makes me think Japan would have a hard time trying to stomach selling their products for less money, unless they could contract some of the American CD manufacturers to press and distribute the CDs for them so they wouldn't have to send them overseas and spend all that extra money. As previously mentioned, Tofu records did the same thing before, but they were very limited on the artists they had at their disposal and they were very specifically targeting the anime audience, though, at this point, that is probably the smart thing to do, since those people have already had some exposure to this type of thing, as opposed to the 90 some percent of Americans who wouldn't even give something in a foreign language a second look. I think if they also showed more anime on American TV, this would easily help with promotion, but that's probably even bigger of a beast to try and tackle the American TV networks than it would be the music industry.

At the very core of the issue is the factor that anyone who has been an open fan of Jpop before surely knows, and that is simply the closed-mindedness of the American public. This comes from the absurd American thought process that is so often associated with music, where people think that the lyrics of a song have to "make sense" or "speak to them" in some really shallow, self-fulfilling way to be valid as music, and obviously if they don't understand what's being said, it becomes instantly invalid, regardless of musical quality. Then you could always question someone who uses this process as to how much value classical music has, which usually has no lyrics or vocals, yet very clearly inspired every form of modern music around. But we're not going to get into that. This is definitely not a barrier that is going to be broken anytime soon, if ever, but it will be interesting to see if anything comes from this.