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. 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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