With the spread of the Internet and other changes in the cultural landscape, CD sales are following a downward trend. The music industry has been pushed into a tight squeeze, and musicians are taking the blame. How will the music industry evolve in this environment? Is there any means of survival for musicians? We asked ☆Taku Takahashi, member of popular group m-flo and no stranger to airing his opinions on Twitter and in the media, for his thoughts.
Even looking at the hit charts, only idols are selling, and music as a whole continues to be in a decline. Where do you think this problem is coming from? It relates to our slow evolution. If you look at Japan’s music from the position of worldwide trends, we’re extremely behind the times. And, unfortunately, Japanese people have yet to realize that.
What issues are influencing our slow progress? Of course, that there’ll be likes and dislikes in music is natural and even important, I believe. However, we’re too far removed from the world’s trends. As a result, we’re falling behind in the art of training vocalists [singers], and our songs and visuals are becoming stale.
Furthermore, the present business model of the music industry as an entertainment format is the same one we’ve used for the past forty years. Just like a bad version of the Galapagos, we’re being left behind by other regions.
Is there a great difference in singing ability compared to overseas as well? We have plenty of skilled vocalists and creators who could compete even overseas, but they’re highly unsuccessful once they do try to challenge that. To give one reason for this, it’s because Japan’s music industry hasn’t taken risks.
In music and other forms of art, the sender needs to grow with their recipient. Even if a new type of music is unleashed into the world, it won’t be accepted immediately — the target audience has to learn and mature over time for it to be received by a greater number of people. At the same time, I can understand why, as a business, the industry faces a dilemma when something doesn’t instantly sell.
Nevertheless, Japan’s music industry stresses high sales too heavily, leading them to choose “no-risk” options, and that’s been going on for more than twenty years. We should’ve taken new risks with music in the ‘90s when CDs were ordinarily able to sell between one and two million copies, but because we entered into a “safety first” defense mode, we weren’t able to grow with users.
As a result, I hear that the production expense for musicians to create good music is becoming worse and worse. Fully-equipped studios are also being erased from existence. Things could become quite severe for groups based around live instruments. While I’m naturally troubled that studios are becoming obsolete, to propose an extreme argument, music can be made anywhere in today’s generation [with the advancement of digital tools and their drop in price]. At the same time, I believe we’re going into a generation that’s looking for more creativity.
It’s easy to place the blame for everything on the Internet or illegal copies. I certainly won’t say that they have no causal relationship, but in the end, the root of the issue is in the industry having been too conservative towards consumers’ needs, leading them to tighten the rope further around their own necks. Now it’s only possible to put out music that all sounds alike, and users are growing tired of it as well. I think there’s a problem there.
Is this different overseas? It’s completely different. If you listen and compare to American music from the ‘60s onward, you can see that from the ‘60s to the ‘70s and so on, they steadily transformed their sound. Japan also continued to diversify in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but from the ‘90s onward, musically, we haven’t made much progress.
What I find greatly interesting is that — perhaps due to a strong admiration of foreign musicians — in spite of how difficult it was to acquire that knowledge at the time, [Japanese] musicians before the ‘80s would incorporate sounds from overseas.
Some of them may have been rather audacious copies, so much that you might worry “Is this plagiarism?” (laughs), but I think that attitude of adopting new ideas at a steady pace should be commended. What’s ironic is that, despite it being easy to come into contact with foreign music now through the Internet, there’s no attitude of wanting to challenge that. The people themselves, not the shogunate, are choosing national isolationism.
What are the differences between us and America from an industry standpoint? America’s music industry is a large one; however, they place much more importance on the individual. For example, when an American artist puts out one big hit, they’re given the opportunity to decide what to do, and many of them choose independence. They create their own companies, hire managers, then contract with a record label and work this way.
On the other hand, when a big hit is released in Japan, the artist’s management office says, “Best regards for another many years. Let’s keep working hard together from now on.” Then that artist says OK and their relationship continues. I don’t believe that this relationship is always a bad thing. In fact, in my case, I worked in a wonderful environment where I was allowed to do what I liked. The problem is that environments like those are extremely rare. So that has an impact on music trends as well, because the onus isn’t only on the individual but the whole system, which means they end up avoiding risks at any cost. To put it simply, they take a share in the risk.
Taking risks on your own like what’s done in America gives you the ability to decide to bring in new sounds immediately. In Japan, companies decide, “This sound is cool, but we’ll have a hard time if it doesn’t sell,” and so situations in which artists come to make those same decisions become common.
What exactly do you mean by not taking risks? When a musician is aiming for a hit, the first thing they go after is a [commercial, drama, etc.] tie-in. Moving forward with a tie-in requires the involvement of officials from many corporations. Among them — and this may be unavoidable — will be people who don’t really like music or people who don’t make music a part of their lifestyles. Rather than seeking out new things, there’s a sense of protecting the status quo. For that reason as well as others, our time axis is out of alignment with the world’s trends.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t good songs being made in Japan exactly. Indeed, I think there are still songs good enough to change lives being produced today. However, speaking in terms of trends as seen from a global perspective, opportunities for cutting-edge styles to break into the upper rankings are becoming increasingly scarce. And when I talk about this, I see people saying “Why does our music have to apply to the rest of the world?” on Internet forums and elsewhere.