hontou ni sou omou?

Two orders from RightStuf arrived today. Over the three weeks it took them to make their trans-Atlantic journey, I’ve been brooding about the relative success of US-based anime distributors’ strategies vis-a-vis my wallet and how we, fansub-downloading anime fans, can better market ourselves.

The first shipment was a pre-order, made during the previous RightStuf Bandai sale, for the Haruhi Limited Edition boxsets 2-4 and joins the first Haruhi LE boxset in my anime DVD collection now. The second batch was a panicked order, a few weeks later as GENEON USA announced that they were closing down, for the first season of Black Lagoon, the Kannazuki no Miko and Kamichu! boxsets (with ADV’s 801 TTS Airbats and Bandai’s Onegai Twins also in this shipment).

RightStuf had offered terrific deals via studio sales for both Bandai Entertainment and GENEON USA products. In the case of the former, there were biannual (March and August) sales of up to 40% off for DVDs. For the latter, RightStuf was offering 10 GENEON releases for USD 50 or 25 for USD 100 in June and then a 35% discount for DVDs in August.

Both offered excellent value for money. Yet I only took Bandai’s bait. The GENEON 10 for 25 offer just seemed too cumbersome, and I was mildly put off by the 5% differential with Bandai later. Somehow I imagined that they would, one day, match Bandai’s offer. And besides I was also waiting for Black Lagoon and Black Lagoon: The Second Barrage to be released as a thinpak boxset before consolidating a humungous order under a sale that never came. In the end, I ended up paying full price for the GENEON order, the blow softened by the grace of RightStuf’s GotAnime? membership discount. While Bandai got a lower profit margin from my purchase, they had succeeded in repeatedly overcoming my not inconsiderable powers of procrastination rather too easily for my wallet’s liking.

Of course, Bandai had an advantage because of how much I was caught up in the Haruhi craze. But, with a speedy release, they did not just manage to ride the craze in just a nick of time but also actively fanned it further. I absolutely loved the antics of the ASOS Brigade and the moment Patricia Lee, channelling the Divinity of Haruhi Herself, said: ‘I’m cool with fans who download the series but please buy the DVD when it comes out.’ Cute girl, with divine power, saying please oh so nicely oh melting cannot resist I obey my master! GENEON’s marketing did not quite manage to capture my attention in the same way. But at least they did send out a bunch of threatening but legally dubious letters tarring its most likely customers with U R T3H CRIMINALZ.

It’s strongly contested and still uncertain if downloaders are indeed an anime distributor’s most likely customers but, as others have pointed out, who spends extra cash to buy Limited Edition goods of series that they’ve never seen before? The LE is a necessary marketing tool for Japanese distributors since most Japanese anime makes its debut on TV or cable and can be easily recorded by its viewers. Fansubbers and BitTorrent reproduce this effect in markets outside Japan by effectively making anime ‘free to air’. The marketing question then becomes how to induce fans who have the AVIs (or increasingly MKVs) to buy The Real Thing.

LE stuff, with their special packaging and assorted undownloadable goodies like mini-pencilboards, iron-ons, physical chara song CDs, pillow cases etc., helps to reduce the substitution effect of fansubs by increasing the otaku utility of the DVD (and its assorted goodies) relative to the fansub. This is not to claim that LEs are a marketing silver bullet. In my case, I’ll probably sit out the Lucky Star LEs and wait for the thinpak boxset. Unless they are giving out the chara Nendriods with the animal ears. orz

The previous two paragraphs were predicated on the assumption that fansubs and DVDs are competing with each for market share. Generally this assumption leads to another one: that the zero marginal cost of fansubs represent a threat to the DVD market share and an existential threat to the anime DVD industry. Yet downloaders still buy DVDs. Anime distributors often dismiss this as an abnormality or aberration, arguing that their sales would be higher if they weren’t being cannibalized by fansubs. This is certainly logical, based on the assumptions above, and can be supported by empirical facts - I haven’t bought everything that I downloaded and there are fans who have never bought a single DVD at all. In the world of music, it’s been reported that only 38% of those who download Radiohead’s latest album were prepared to pay for it. But turning this argument on its head, it could be said that 38% of downloaders paid for it despite them being under absolutely no legal obligation to do so.

Then there is the argument that downloading can have (but not always so) market creating effects, i.e. people becoming customers because they downloaded a product, as reported by this piece of research by the Canadian Intellectual Property Policy Directorate.

Leaving aside the moral economy of fandom (which I believe can be a powerful marketing tool if correctly tapped into), my top reasons for buying DVDs include (1) rewatching in higher quality, (2) backup against disastrous HDD failure, (3) improving my fair use defence for retaining fansubs on HDD. Certainly I can’t think of an anime DVD that I’ve bought where I haven’t seen the fansub first. It’s quite likely that if the noose grows too tight and I give up on downloading fansubs, my purchases of anime DVDs will stop too.

But one little animeblogger isn’t really much evidence of the market creation effects of fansubs (N=1 is waaay below any N-size confidence level). However if we can market ourselves to the anime distributors as well as Bandai has marketed to me, perhaps the relationship can become somewhat less confrontational and the discourse less shrill. I feel (and hope that) it will be helpful for fandom’s image if animebloggers like ourselves post more about our purchases, particularly of DVDs. I realize that some animebloggers see this as the swaggering of ‘epenis’, bragging, boasting etc. Certainly sometimes it is true, but posting about purchases is not intrinsically an obnoxious act - after all, tjhan claims that most animebloggers are docile grazers, generally a nice, genial lot.

Anime distributors may not like us much, but they will certainly like our spending dollars and evidence of our dollars being spent on their goodies. Lo and behold, the otaku yen has even induced the townsfolk of Washinomiya to, at least, hide their misgivings and roll out the welcome mat to the A(kihabara)-Boys.

One day, by the AWESOME power of the Church of Moyism, we will not have live in fear of yet another witch hunt. In the meantime, RightStuf is having a 30% sale until 2 Dec!