Wrestling with or Embracing Digitization in the Music Industry: The Contrasting Business Strategies of J-pop and K-pop

Abstract

Digitization has significantly changed the process for producing and consuming music: from analogue to digital, albums to songs, possess to access, audio to visual, and end products to promotional products. In this globalized digital era, actively embracing digitization would likely help enhance the competitiveness of the music industry. The rise of K-pop and the decline of J-pop clearly demonstrate the different results from whether to embrace or wrestle with digitization. The Korean music industry recognized changes brought on by digitization earlier and was more active in responding with effective strategies. By contrast, the Japanese music industry did not immediately respond to these changes but stuck to its rent-seeking behavior in order to take advantage of its larger market size and "sophisticated" copyright regime. The implications from this paper is that business activities are the core element for creating and enhancing competitiveness of the music industries.

East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China

“…Johnny and Associates was established in the early 1960s, many years before digital media, and the company was slow to get involved in digital platforms. Although Japan was the first country to manufacture, market and sell CDs during the 1980s (and Sony introduced digital studio technologies during this period), the Japanese recording industry and music fans were less enthusiastic about digital files and remained attached to physical artefacts (Parc and Kawashima, 2018). The Korean music industry engaged with digitalization more rapidly than Japan.…”

The true impact of shorter and longer copyright durations: from authors’ earnings to cultural creativity and diversity

“…As this paper places these issues related to digitization, technological advancements, and their impact aside, they can be further analyzed in order to draw important implications that can be applicable during this period. In this regard, several real-world examples such as the emergence of Netflix or even the Korean music industry with K-pop can hint at ways to overcome copyright issues in the era of digitization (Parc and Kawashima 2018;Parc and Kim 2020). This task can be synergistically undertaken by utilizing and applying the findings of this paper.…”

“…This is even the case with the digital age despite the great transformations that have occurred in the cultural industries. Second, the ways to gain revenues (or income) have diversified (or even shifted away) from traditional ones such as sales of works to other new sources (Parc and Kawashima 2018;Parc and Kim 2020). In particular, reputational earnings can eventually be rendered into monetary earnings.…”

“…Yet much of the academic research conducted on this is conflicting and fails to arrive at any consensus (refer to Rogers [2013]). More importantly, this view has ignored new and alternative income sources of revenue such as concerts and sales of other derivative goods (Parc and Kawashima 2018;Parc and Kim 2020). 5.…”

The Digital Transformation of the Korean Music Industry and the Global Emergence of K-Pop

“…These landmark achievements stand in stark contrast to the situation that the Korean music industry was faced with in the period before the 1990s. Throughout this time, observers pointed out a wide number of factors that hindered its development, such as the dominance of Japanese music styles, Western influences, government censorship, international pressure to open its market, plagiarism, piracy, and negative domestic market conditions (refer to Parc and Kawashima [8] and Parc, Messerlin, and Moon [9]). In particular, Korea was for a long time regarded as existing outside of the "core countries" in the cultural sector.…”