Mobile music is again the shining light in Japan, making up for the decline in CD sales. “Total music sales for 2007 in Japan came to JPY 466 billion (US $4.66 billion). While CD/DVD sales declined 4 percent from the previous year, digital downloads jumped up 41 percent to JPY 75.5 billion (US $755 million), comprising 16 percent of all music sold in Japan. Mobile downloads accounted for JPY 68 billion (US $680 million), more than 90 percent of the total figure for digital sales. Within the mobile sector, full-track downloads showed the strongest growth, rising 91 percent over the previous year” writes J@pan Inc in its Music Media Watch newsletter, quoting the RIAJ Yearbook 2008.
The article attempts an explanation of why mobile music still dominates digital music in Japan in contrast to other countries, putting it down to habit (many young people started downloading digital music on their mobiles and see no reason to change), the mobile sites run by the labels have a far more complete catalogue of J-Pop, and the fairly obvious attraction of faster networks, better handsets and flat-rate data plans. iPods are popular, but apparently among the older generation who rip music from CDs.
It seems that the RIAJ has admitted that copyright infringement didn’t play a part in the decline in CD sales — years ago the organization cried “piracy” when CD sales started to fall, and claimed that overall music sales were falling by the simple method of excluding mobile music for the spurious reason that the labels weren’t getting royalties. Anyway, now RIAJ is shouting piracy again, this time in the mobile music market, claiming that “more than 400 million mobile tracks were illegally downloaded in Japan last year, mostly from anonymous BBS-type mobile sites”, and it has started a series of TV ad campaigns to convince people not to download music illegally.
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