
CD-Loving Japan Resists Move to Online Music - w1ntermute
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/business/media/cd-loving-japan-resists-move-to-digital-music-.html
======
krick
I feel almost guilty admitting it, but these behaviour seems completely
natural to me. Paper books, music on CDs. Seems to me much more rational to
buy something like this, than buying (heck, it's not even buying, it's more
like renting by some weird license!) array of bytes, that can be deleted by
some Apple or Amazon from your device, and doing so for nearly the same money
as if you buy real book or CD! It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like
western people are totally irrational and insane!

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.

~~~
jdminhbg
Amazon and Apple both sell DRM-free audio files, which is no different than
buying and ripping a CD, minus having the superfluous physical disc lying
around. They can't be deleted from your device.

~~~
rsync
For random songs, I use the amazon store, which I am very happy with - the
ability to download a plain old, DRM-free mp3 file is a consumer-friendly
environment that I would not have predicted in this day and age.

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.

~~~
TheDong
Why the hell would you rip it to WAV/PCM and not FLAC? You'll save on the
order of 80% space without losing any quality; you can always convert the FLAC
right back to WAV without anything being different.

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.

~~~
rsync
Not every use case involves a system that can play FLAC files, but just about
_everything_ can play a WAV file. For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on
MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.

Again, having the WAV file means I never have to touch that music again. Ever.

~~~
jdboyd
I used to play flac files on my Octane (300 MHz,1 CPU). Given how little load
it caused, I'd expect it to work well on a O2 180mhz r5k. Perhaps you are
using an older still iris machine though?

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.

------
kohsuke
Being from Japan, I have a few thoughts in this area:

* 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.

~~~
josu
>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.

I don't understand what you mean by tickets and votes. It sounds really
interesting, and I'd be grateful if you could elaborate.

~~~
treme
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKB48](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKB48)
Basically every "season", fans get to vote on their favorite member of huge
roaster-pop group that J-pop has pioneered.

"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."

~~~
w1ntermute
What's interesting is that each physical copy of Taylor Swift's latest album,
_1989_ , includes 1 of 5 possible sets of 13 polaroids[0], and it's set to
have the biggest sales week (in the US, presumably) of any album since
2002[1]. I wonder if she didn't steal this idea from AKB48.

0:
[https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/526459191826079744](https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/526459191826079744)

1: [http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-
beat/6304336...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-
beat/6304336/taylor-swift-1989-biggest-sales-week-since-2002)

~~~
carussell
Seems even closer to what Pearl Jam did for their 1996 album.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Code#Packaging_and_title](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Code#Packaging_and_title)

------
lpsz
I live nearby in Asia, and local friends describe their reason for buying CDs
as "something to collect" or, as having a piece of the artist's creation to
actually hold. Even if online music is accessible, it doesn't give that
feeling of "ownership" after spending money.

~~~
masklinn
> local friends describe their reason for buying CDs as "something to collect"

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...](http://aap.blackaris2001.org/AlienHead/Alien25thAnniversaryCollection2.jpg)
was their Alien 25th Anniversary Collection boxset

~~~
stplsd
And do not forget mystical Obi!

~~~
Gigablah
The fact that people throw away the obi makes my blood boil.

------
ekianjo
It's not just digital music downloads in Japan which are not taking off.
Ebooks are still far from reaching any significant share on the market, and a
large part is coming from the lack of cooperation of the publishers who refuse
to have digital versions of their paper books. It's a completely locked market
in many regards with decisions made by risk-averse companies and company
presidents. I have never seen Japan as modern when it comes to Internet
services / downloads and the like. They seem to be permanently stuck in old
habits (Yahoo is still the main web page they use on a daily basis),
registration heavy services (needing 7 steps from beginning to the point where
you are able to log in) and web pages that still look like 1.0 era.

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
Part of the reason for this is that ebook formatting/typesetting tends to be
terrible in logographic languages. I don't know why, but typesetting in the
ebook world is much worse there. I have a Japanese friend who complains
constantly about any ebook she gets.

~~~
barrkel
Typesetting for English language ebooks is pretty dreadful too. And for older
titles, they're usually littered with OCR errors too. I'd be surprised if they
receive more than a couple of hours of QA.

~~~
intopieces
I am pleased that someone else has noticed this. I recently purchased a copy
of the Neal Stephenson book "Cryptonomicon" and it's full of errors where a
word was hyphenated in the original text, but the digital text has replaced
the hyphen with a space. You get words like "Pat tern"; I'm shocked at how
little they bothered to proof read the digital versions before they sent it
out. I'm inclined to ask for a refund.

~~~
sondr3
I had the same problem when I read The Selfish Gene, it was littered with
weird line breaks, OCR errors and general layout strangeness. So much so that
I went through it myself and fixed most of it because it annoyed me too much.

------
Daiz
This is something that really annoys me, as this kind of averse attitude to
online distribution is also prevalent among Japanese indie (doujin) musicians.
They release their albums only physically, first during doujin events and then
to various shops. You might be able to buy the albums physically from some
Japanese web stores, but then you get hit with damn expensive import fees (so
better buy a lot of stuff at the same time), not to mention any potential
customs fees (which are easy to get when buying a lot of stuff at the same
time). And since the physical copies are also limited, trying to get older
albums legitimately can be pretty much impossible.

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.

[1] [https://soundcloud.com/nachi_tt/supernova-
crossfade](https://soundcloud.com/nachi_tt/supernova-crossfade)

~~~
coldtea
Wow, that delights me. Finally some music that doesn't cater to "I want it
now" consumer mindset!

~~~
harshreality
Doesn't this music cater to the "I'm going to judge _music_ partly based on
how the artists decide to distribute it" crowd? That has nothing to do with
musicianship or sound.

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).

~~~
coldtea
> _That has nothing to do with musicianship or sound._

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...

~~~
harshreality
I agree the reality is people judge music by the experience and not the sound,
but isn't that silly?

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"?

------
jccalhoun
While we in the West tend to think of Japan as futuristic in a lot of ways
they are still stuck in the 90s:

They still commonly use fax machines
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-
fa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-
is-anything-but-a-relic.html)

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?)

~~~
digi_owl
I seem to recall that various US agencies still require fax, because it is an
approved legal document. I suspect something similar is in effect in Japan.
Heck, South Korea is pretty much stuck on IE because they produced a national
e-commerce solution based on ActiveX back in the day. Tech quickly outrun law,
especially communications tech.

~~~
jccalhoun
yes there are situations where faxes are needed in the USA. As I understand it
mostly is in cases regarding legal documents. In the NYTimes article i linked
in the previous post though they talk about individuals still buying fax
machines and people preferring to fax their lunch orders to a restaurant
instead of doing it on a website.

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.

~~~
j_lev
Keep in mind the marginal cost of getting a phone-fax instead of a regular
phone for home here (Japan) is practically zero.

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.

------
danso
A couple of questions I have...does Japan also resist the movement towards
online gaming purchases? Nintendo and Sony offer pretty robust online delivery
services...are they as popular in Japan as in the U.S.?

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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-
is-anything-but-a-relic.html))

> _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._

~~~
w1ntermute
> Nintendo and Sony offer pretty robust online delivery services

I would say that they're both lightyears behind Microsoft/Xbox.

~~~
bane
Here's a great article on some of the challenges.

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret-
developers-wii-u-the-inside-story)

"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."

~~~
digi_owl
>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 (!)

No surprise there. Giri is still a very real thing in Japan, tho it is fading
slowly with the generations.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_%28Japanese%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_%28Japanese%29)

~~~
w1ntermute
One of the funniest incarnations of _giri_ is _giri choco_ [0] and _honmei
choco_ [1].

0:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_choco](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_choco)

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honmei_choco](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honmei_choco)

------
japhyr
I grew up in the 70's and 80's, and the first music I ever bought was on
cassettes. Fortunately CD's came out when I was in middle school, so I was
buying CDs when I really started building my own music collection.

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...](http://content.abt.com/image.php/big_cdpcx455.jpg?image=/images/products/BDP_Images/big_cdpcx455.jpg&canvas=1&quality=100&min_w=450&min_h=320&ck=334)

------
zdw
Two things I gathered from living with Japanese exchange students in the late
90's:

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.

~~~
kalleboo
The rental stores are still around, and still see business.

------
brownbat
Japan has made a lot of breakthroughs in certain areas of technology which, as
a consequence, they'll probably be the last to abandon.

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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Science_%26_Technology_Research_Laboratories)

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...](http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/pdf/10_no8_07.pdf)

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.

------
stcredzero
_array of bytes, that can be deleted by some Apple or Amazon from your device,
and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD! It 's
not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally
irrational and insane!_

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.

------
EGreg
I remember when I was about 23 and anticipating moving out into my first
apartment - in Manhattan no less! - I would go into Tower Records and browse
for CDs to buy. It was a symbol for me of my independence and ability to
select my taste in music, for my pad. There was a time when having a
collection meant something. I missed the vinyl generation, but a few years
after I had already bought probably $200 worth of CDs, Steve Jobs did that
major thing - disrupting the music industry by introducing iTunes.

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](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.

------
beefsack
I've converted back to physical CDs from buying digital music and love it for
a few reasons:

* 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.

------
TheJanitor
I agree with the notion that having CD's bring a more personal attachment to
the product. For example i'm still looking forward to buying the dead tree
version of TAOCP, though i agree that searching will be a bit faster on an
ebook. Not sure if reading TAOCP requires you to move around too much or its
more on reading it allows you to concentrate and focus on one chapter at a
time.

------
zem
A bit off-topic, but a while ago I wrote a crossword clue

Japanese play CDS only? (3)

I'm gratified to find out that the surface was more accurate than I realised
:)

------
hellbanner
I visited the Sound Gallery* in Austin, Texas recently. The owner talked at
length of the continual transition of lessening quality audio mediums in
exchange for widespread. High-fidelity analog to vinyl to cassettes to cds to
mp3s to.. streaming. Paraphrasing: "You don't own a stream. You can't hold it
in your hands -- you can't drop it and break it. But it sounds like shit."

* [http://soundgalleryaustin.com/](http://soundgalleryaustin.com/)

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Any claim which relies on the superiority of cassettes over CDs is inherently
suspect.

~~~
ams6110
Well there were DATs for a while, they never really caught on with the public.

------
101914
Is it good to hear Tower Records lives on, even if not in the U.S.

------
KhalilK
But..But...What about vinyl?

------
bluedino
Is piracy high in Japan?

~~~
subsection1h
No.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_versus_Ninjas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_versus_Ninjas)

~~~
j_lev
lol

"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.

~~~
cthalupa
The entire anime industry is pretty much the worst thing ever, economics wise.

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.

------
notastartup
As a buyer of many games on steam, especially ridiculously expensive 20 year
old games, I long to purchase the actual CD case along with manual, cover art,
everything.

