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Japan’s digital revenues falling, but show signs of hope
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 20 June 2013
Although Japan’s recorded music revenues are growing at a rate that could see the country pass the US as the world’s biggest market for recorded music this year, the bulk of its revenues still come from physical sales. And, in fact, new figures from the Recording Industry Of Japan show that the country’s digital music revenues overall are currently falling.
Digital music take-up in Japan has been slow, with iTunes only now starting to make any sort of headway, despite launching there in 2005 (though partly because Sony Music Japan didn’t get on board until last year). Subscription services are also showing slow growth. None of this is helped by the fact that some major Japanese artists still only release their music in physical form, most notably massively popular pop group/franchise AKB48.
However, there is a silver lining. According to McClure Music, the main cause of the digital decline in the first quarter of this year is a substantial drop in the number of ringtones being sold, which fell by 52% from January to March, resulting in a 25% fall in revenues on the previous quarter and 30% year-on-year. Sales of music through pre-smartphone devices – mobile internet having always been more popular than desktop in Japan – also plunged by 57% for single track downloads.
But here is the good news. While ringtone sales are falling on smartphones too, single track sales through the more sophisticated mobile devices increased by 33% in the same period, bringing in 3.7 billion yen (£24.7 million), while smartphone album sales were up 65% to 1.7 billion yen (£11.4 million). All of which suggests that increasing smartphone ownership in Japan (a market still well behind the US) may finally be bringing consumers there around to digital music a bit more.
Though Japanese labels are still somewhat resistant, and to put things in perspective, while the country’s digital market was worth 10.9 billion yen (£73.2 million) in the first quarter of 2013, physical sales in the same period brought in revenues of 47 billion yen, or around £315.5 million.
