hontou ni sou omou? » buy our stuff

Sing till the dawn

Zyl — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:43:06 +0000

I was LOL when Yuki took out the kiddie electronic keyboard with microphone. And when she started belting out ‘Paradise Lost’ against the simplified tune, I just lost it. Great seiyuu in-joke. And that Ga-Rei Zero OP song was my second favourite thing from the series. Other songs I’d love to hear on the Yuki Minfong Ho repetorie would be Junpaku Sanctuary, mokutt minami growing (LOL) and, of course, Yuki, Muon, Madobe nite. Suggestions for duet with Achakura?

But I was still surprised that a song from an anime by another studio (in this case, AIC Spirits & asread). Yeah I know KyoAni did that too for the Lucky Star EDs with the closed karaoke room door but I don’t think those were recent anime. Paradise Lost was comparatively much more recent. Other animes, like Hayate no Gotoku, seem to take great pains only to sample its own music – minimize royalty payouts and maximize pimpage of own stuff?

Courage, Wife and Downloading

Zyl — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:12:59 +0000

I wanted to write about an NGO’s report that filesharers buy more media stuff than non-filesharers but the initial Slashdot post was a bit thin and the report is only available in Dutch. Today another post on the same report popped up again on Slashdot linking to an article with a bit more content.

Basically, one of the highlights is that filesharers buy as much music as non-filesharers. They also buy more DVDs, games, merchandise and attend more concerts. This… sounds kind of familiar.

I haven’t bought a pop music CD in years. But I don’t download pop music either. I haven’t listened to the radio using a radio for ages. Once in a while I’ll still tune into BBC World Service and BBC3 via their respective streams on their websites. I haven’t bought a Hollywood movie DVD in ages either. That’s mostly because I don’t enjoy most of them anyway, I’ve given up going to cinemas on my own and I fly pretty often now so I can watch them on the plane if I really wanted to (but most of the time I end up watching Chinese, Korean or Japanese movies).

But I buy lots of anime DVDs and usually only of series that I’ve downloaded, seen before and anticipate wanting to watch again. And again. Stripey and I call this last criteria The Jeff Lawson Test.

Interest in anime and manga, buoyed by a constant bit-torrent of downloads, also feeds the desire to buy other undownloadable stuff. Like figures. T-shirts. Towels. Hug pillow covers. Etcetera. Conversely, fading interest (not another dreaded hiatus post!) in downloading anime also means the drying up of spending on goods and merchandise. And sometimes these matters have their own life cycles.

The diviners of the powers that be can still misread the stars and prescribe some pretty damned silly things like thinking the Water Spirit is really the Drought Demon and that the bearer of its Egg Must Be Killed. Which is why a translated copy of that Institute for International Law report, we needs it.

Oh, and in case anyone didn’t get the title: here and here.

Anime piracy as a demand creation and sales generation phenomenon

Zyl — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:21:41 +0000

Dr Nissim Kadosh Otmazgin, Kyoto University, recently published an article ‘Contesting soft power: Japanese popular culture in East and Southeast Asia’, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Vol.8 No.1 (2007) which examines the relationship between Japanese cultural products and Japanese soft power. In the second section of the article, he discusses the proliferation of Japanese games, anime/manga, live action TV drama and karaoke in East Asia, concluding that:

East Asia’s pirated markets thus paved the way for the Japanese popular culture industries’ entry into new markets. The informal circulation of pirated versions of Japanese popular culture has effectively popularized the products in the markets they were legally banned from [e.g. South Korea]. By the time the Japanese popular culture industries were allowed to export to the newly opened markets, the demand for their products were already created and they could immediately generate sales. (Footnote 17) The consequences was a wider circulation of Japanese culture.

(17) In interviews with media industry personnel in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, some have indicated that the Japanese media companies are investing very little, or none, in fighting the piracy of their own products. This is in sharp contradiction to the American media companies. In this regard, a few have speculated that this was intentional, as ignoring piracy allowed the Japanese popular culture to become popular, while profit was generated after the markets had been opened and regulated (Author’s interviews, June to August 2004). [p.85]

There might be a more simple economic explanation. One standard line is that anime downloads cause sales to fall. This is true to the extent that the downloaded files are perfect or close to perfect substitutes for their products; raw watchers who do not hoard their non-fansubbed downloads (i.e. delete after watching) are the prime example of such a group. To them, it’s like trying to force them to buy the DVD for Friends or NCIS when they can understand English, have seen it on their TV already and don’t intend to rewatch that episode again EVAR.

Which has some parallels like what the market situation is like in Japan where most anime is broadcast on cable TV first and then released on DVD. Of course, the anime studios still make money from cable subscriptions but it’s arguable that DVD and merchandise (visual collection picture books, figurines, pillow cases etc.) are more lucrative and are an essential part of the revenue stream. In the latter case, the anime studio may make peanuts from the cable broadcast and zilch from the Winny downloaders and video streamers but sections of the latter group have been sufficiently seduced into buying stuff by the mere exposure to their pirated product.

I think that enforcement action against commercial bootleg pirates is reasonable particularly if legit releases are of decent quality, timeliness and sold at reasonable prices. But it seems to me that it would be more productive to leverage on the otaku culture that comes with Japanese anime, which Kadokawa’s ASOS Brigade campaign and Limited Edition DVD release was a shining example of how fans want to own something nice even though they’ve already seen it, nay, precisely because they’ve already seen it.

Conversely, if fans feel hounded and coerced, even with as a great a power as Anime Tenchou’s GEASS on Konata, I would not be too surprised if many would just drop the hobby completely, shift to something else, leading to Market Assured Destruction.