Like pretty much everything these days, the fortunes of the music business in 2008 were mainly tied to the global economy. CD sales have long been dropping steadily, mostly due to the steady increase in illegal downloading, but until this year, top artists could still count on fairly decent sales, and indie bands were doing OK by taking the do-it-yourself route.
The center didn't hold in 2008. EMI closed offices all over the world and talked about joining forces with Warner. BMG, which in 2004 hooked up worldwide with Sony, as Sony BMG, basically evaporated when Sony bought it out in October — leaving Japan as the only remaining territory where BMG maintains its brand. V2 Records, once one of the world's most important indie labels, stopped putting out new music. The simple truth is that people — or, at least, young people — don't see the point in paying for music anymore.
However, if the record business is dying, it's mostly poisoned by its own hand. In a critical piece that appeared last May in the Asahi Shimbun, music journalist Daisuke Tsuda took Japan's music industry to task for its continuously gloomy outlook and self-pitying attitude. Tsuda says that record companies obsess over CD sales as an excuse for maintaining high retail prices and asking for stricter copyright laws, both of which hurt consumers in the end. With more imagination and an open-price policy — the prices of domestically manufactured CDs in Japan are still fixed — these companies could turn themselves around without too much trouble.