Temporary Flux
The current state of affairs in Japan since last week, the music business is changing its course. Idol-groups are getting obsolete, comedy-duos performing at underground gigs for the Yakuza, the unbelievable work-conditions and almost illegal contracts many of these young people have to sign is finally coming to an end.
I’ve always felt that Japan is so self-centered when it comes to their own music and there is a massive industry waiting for their music to be heard in the rest of the world, but Japan has always said its really expensive to export their own music outside their own country.
A colleague of mine used to play guitar on UFO (United Future Organization) and he said the band paid a crazy amount of export tax on their OWN ALBUMS. Which seems really wrong to me.
But the goal here is also to make the new artist appealing to the rest of the world, and that means to have a clear song-structure. Last night I saw this talent, variety show and the quality between the K-pop stars and J-pop stars were like millions of light-years in between. But there were trade-offs. K-pop had the music and the choreography, but the girls were not singing at all. Even though if they were, there was like 18 headset-mics that would be even crazy for a sound-engineer to control. But it is no surprise that their music is catchy as hell due to a lot of foreigners are producing K-pop like my friend and colleague Chris Nairs.
The J-pop singers at least were singing on stage, but couldn’t hit their notes. This industry is in need of change since the man behind the male idol-groups “Johnny’s”, turned out to be a complete pervert and a pedophile, with an iron-grip controlling everything and every step these bands were taking.
If J-pop want to be what K-pop is today (A global phenomenon), they need to open their doors to foreign producers to help them expand to the rest of the world. K-pop has been quite a new industry which brought more attention to Korea as a country and their economy is booming because of this.
Sweden has always been a small country, but we have produced the biggest acts in the industry which also helped our economy. Japan should start thinking the same, reduce the tax-restriction on exporting music to other countries. I know there is the need for Japanese music in other countries so people can learn and study in fun ways. The change is happening, and after the Olympics, there will be a demand for more Japanese pop-acts to go on tour in other countries besides Japan.
