Hi. Do you know why there's only a few musics of Kalafina and FJ on Spotify? Isn't interesting to them to offer all the discography?
Hi there!
Spotify is not really a āthingā here in Austria (or maybe it is, no idea o.O), I donāt use it and I donāt know anyone who uses it so I am pretty clueless when it comes to the details about how it works exactly. I have done a little research though and from what I can tell, itās entirely up to the label and/or the artist/artist management to decide which of their songs are made available for streaming on Spotify. I can only assume that there are certain songs that they just DO NOT WANT to have on the platform for whatever reason (licensing issues? a general dislike of streaming services? who knows...)
Also, I would like to remind you that the Japanese music industry is pretty old-fashioned. They mostly care about physical sales while digital music and streaming services are often no more than an afterthought (that mindset is slowly changing but itās gonna take a few more years). This is mainly due to the fact that music distribution in Japan is pretty freaking expensive for the involved parties (say hello to Japanās crazy bureaucracy).
Naturally, the highest priority is to make a lot of money by selling physical copies within Japan, not to reach a wider international audience. Japanese artists are not making much (if any) profit by putting their music on Western digital media platforms like iTunes or Spotify (they have their own online digital music stores like Mora Japan with considerably higher prices!) so itās really no surprise they are not particularly invested in offering their entire discography on those platforms (or they are only offering it sporadically in selected countries). It simply doesnāt pay off for them. I would argue it costs them more money to offer their music to a non-Japanese audience than they would ever be able to make from foreign sales on digital markets (just look at the cheap as hell international iTunes prices and you will know what I am talking about). For the most part foreigners are just not willing/able to pay that much money for music.Ā
So yeah, thatās my take on the whole matter.
