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NEWS: Crunchyroll Adds Music Videos, Full-Length Concerts in Partnership with Sony Music


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invalidname
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Joined: 11 Aug 2004
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Location: Grand Rapids, MI
PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 7:09 am Reply with quote
For years, I've been hoping that western anime licensors would give us more access to anime music concerts than just Mikunopolis and the BanG Dream! FILM LIVE anime concert movies, so this is a step in the right direction.

From a quick poke around the iPad app, the new material is not easy to find. There are a handful of concerts on the home tab, but you wouldn't know there were dozens of LiSA music videos unless you searched for her by name. Crunchyroll already uses "Music" as a browsable genre for anime (idol shows, Bocchi the Rock, Sound Euphonium!, etc.), so maybe quickly creating a "Live Music" genre would be a good way to fix the discoverability problem.

From checking out some LiSA and Aimer stuff, the videos appear to be completely un-subtitled. No lyric translations, no romaji of the lyrics, not even subs for the stage banter… Netflix's LiSA concert gave us that much, at least. Japan just can't get out of its own way when it comes to locking down content, I guess, even lyrics.

The other thing that gives me a little pause here is knowing that this collab with Sony Music is probably only possible because Sony owns Crunchyroll. Given that, it's unlikely we'll see other labels participate, like Lantis or Bushiroad (which means we won't be seeing concerts from the IRL groups of the Love Live! or Bang Dream! franchises anytime soon… too bad, because I've driven hundreds of miles to see theatrical showings of delayed lives from Aqours and Roselia).

It's years too late for Japan's music industry to realize that K-Pop ascended worldwide in part because of its wide availability. The best time to have put this stuff on Crunchyroll was 10 years ago. The next best time is now.
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Kougeru



Joined: 13 May 2008
Posts: 5529
PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 10:44 am Reply with quote
so partnership with themselves, they're owned by Sony lol. I was wondering how like this would take, honestly

edit: This is weird. EVERYTHING is locked behind paywall including the stuff that is already on YouTube 100% free. Those should at least be free on CR as well
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mdo7



Joined: 23 May 2007
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 10:54 am Reply with quote
invalidname wrote:

It's years too late for Japan's music industry to realize that K-Pop ascended worldwide in part because of its wide availability. The best time to have put this stuff on Crunchyroll was 10 years ago. The next best time is now.


That's what I've been warning the anime fandom on ANN since 2013 that K-pop was going to outdo their Japanese counterpart when it comes to mainstream appeal and accessibility. I agreed that Japan's music industry had many opportunities since early-mid 2000's to be on the top of the game. I'm not even sure if Japan's music industry/J-pop would ever catch up to K-pop in it's current state because K-pop has already established itself worldwide, and etc... We just witnessed 3 former AKB48 members crossover to K-pop, and there's even a J-pop girl group that have been marketed toward K-pop audiences/demographic by releasing their Japanese songs in Korean to pander to that demographic. So it's going to be hard for J-pop and J-music in general to get a mainstream appeal given that K-pop has outdid J-pop on a global scale. I don't know if J-pop is able to have their BTS or Blackpink or Twice equivalent to be representative of J-pop/J-music. Even a lesser well-known K-pop group can get a big audiences in the US after their debut, something I don't think a J-pop group is able to do.

If a J-music/J-pop artists or groups are going to get attention in the US, they may have to sing in Korean (as in remaking their Japanese songs into Korean) to pander to K-pop fandom (I mean why not, we've seen K-pop group when they debut in Japan, they remake their hit Korean songs into Japanese, why can't the opposite be true for J-pop artists/singers).

Even if Crunchyroll add music videos and concert video(s), it's not going to have a wide reach compared to Youtube, and given that K-pop has already made a big leap and establishment in the music world. It's going to be hard for the same demographic that listened to K-pop to try to crossover to J-pop/J-music (something that still anger some international J-pop fans even to this day).
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MFrontier



Joined: 13 Apr 2014
Posts: 11427
PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 10:54 am Reply with quote
That's cool! I'm not that much into music videos or concerts, but this seems great for those that do.

I didn't know EGOIST had a CG Inori or that Soma Saito's had a kind of folky performance there.
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FukuchiChiisaia





PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 11:13 am Reply with quote
invalidname wrote:
It's years too late for Japan's music industry to realize that K-Pop ascended worldwide in part because of its wide availability. The best time to have put this stuff on Crunchyroll was 10 years ago. The next best time is now.


I still don't get with comparison J-pop vs K-pop
In general, their mainstream scene offer entirely different genres and type of music.

Globally mainstream K-pop itself is mostly idol, while globally mainstream J-pop are anisong. It's totally different core audience.

Comparing them it's like comparing British pop rock and Swedish metal market.
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mdo7



Joined: 23 May 2007
Posts: 6267
Location: Katy, Texas, USA
PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 11:38 am Reply with quote
FukuchiChiisaia wrote:

I still don't get with comparison J-pop vs K-pop
In general, their mainstream scene offer entirely different genres and type of music.

Globally mainstream K-pop itself is mostly idol, while globally mainstream J-pop are anisong. It's totally different core audience.

Comparing them it's like comparing British pop rock and Swedish metal market.


I guess you weren't around in pre-2012, but the fierce rivalry between J-pop and K-pop fandom do get really intense online and given that you're in Indonesia and not in the US//North America like me and probably most of us on ANN. Yes, I know that anisong aren't technically "J-pop" in a broad general sense. But several J-pop idols/singers do sing OST for anime, so that's where J-pop and anisong do sometime overlap.

You can have J-pop fans crossover to anisong, and you can have anisong fans crossing over to J-pop. But the problem is they still get lump into a wider J-pop category by international fans particularly one in US/North America.

Overall, the bigger problem is that some international J-pop fans (not all of them) aren't happy with K-pop particularly BTS, Blackpink, Twice, Seventeen, etc... getting all that mainstream hype and spotlight in the US and worldwide while J-pop/J-music in general aren't getting the global mainstream spotlight that they deserve. I'm not even sure putting MVs on Crunchyroll isn't going to help J-pop when K-pop has already long established themselves on international stage while J-pop and J-music continue to falter behind.
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Ming Yi



Joined: 20 Dec 2005
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 2:55 pm Reply with quote
FukuchiChiisaia wrote:

I still don't get with comparison J-pop vs K-pop
In general, their mainstream scene offer entirely different genres and type of music.


They have different genres and types of music, for sure. However, the constant comparisons are all about global marketing and accessibility.

K-pop was able to break out globally because they adapted to the global market by having things such as English subtitles, making full versions of their music videos on YouTube, and having digital downloads of their music in the 2010s. Music shows also uploaded full performances and behind-the-scenes videos onto YouTube as well.

Japan focused too much on the domestic market in comparison and is stricter in copyright. Many major record labels didn't upload music videos onto YouTube until the late 2010s, and if they did, they would be 30~60 second previews. No vlogs from artists, English subtitles, etc. and plus people were still buying CDs. Any reuploads of performances and music videos would be copyright striked. Also, Arashi was Japan's biggest boy band in the 2010s and it was hard to find content of them if you weren't living in Japan, and they didn't get Twitter until 2020 when they were just about to disband.

tl;dr it was hard to find content unless you lived in Japan, knew Japanese, or were able to access the right communities overseas.

Also, it's really telling when a lot of Japanese youth are way more interested in being K-pop idols than J-pop idols. Sky-Hi even had a reality competition show to create a J-pop boy band partially because of this.
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TheMorry



Joined: 08 May 2014
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 5:10 pm Reply with quote
And yet Crunchyroll has to add so many titles from the funimation library... it's nice they adding music. But get your priorities straight...
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Angel M Cazares



Joined: 23 Sep 2010
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 6:13 pm Reply with quote
Nice. I assume those videos will come with subtitles.
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mdo7



Joined: 23 May 2007
Posts: 6267
Location: Katy, Texas, USA
PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 7:32 pm Reply with quote
Ming Yi wrote:
FukuchiChiisaia wrote:

I still don't get with comparison J-pop vs K-pop
In general, their mainstream scene offer entirely different genres and type of music.


They have different genres and types of music, for sure. However, the constant comparisons are all about global marketing and accessibility.

K-pop was able to break out globally because they adapted to the global market by having things such as English subtitles, making full versions of their music videos on YouTube, and having digital downloads of their music in the 2010s. Music shows also uploaded full performances and behind-the-scenes videos onto YouTube as well.

Japan focused too much on the domestic market in comparison and is stricter in copyright. Many major record labels didn't upload music videos onto YouTube until the late 2010s, and if they did, they would be 30~60 second previews. No vlogs from artists, English subtitles, etc. and plus people were still buying CDs. Any reuploads of performances and music videos would be copyright striked. Also, Arashi was Japan's biggest boy band in the 2010s and it was hard to find content of them if you weren't living in Japan, and they didn't get Twitter until 2020 when they were just about to disband.

tl;dr it was hard to find content unless you lived in Japan, knew Japanese, or were able to access the right communities overseas.


This!!! Also, I want to add something into this thread, and it goes beyond whatever you said. It's not only J-pop/J-music in general, but also the international J-pop/J-music fandom in general which also mystified me.

-J-pop (& J-music in whole) fandom seems to have a unity problem (as evidenced by this 2015 article from AramaJapan). Here's an example of K-pop fandom unity. In 2013, when Universal Music Group block K-pop MVs on Youtube, the K-pop fandom raise a lot of hell on Twitter and Facebook over this. I've never seen this in J-pop fandom when unofficial MVs upload get strike down and removed from YT, no social media backlash from international J-pop fans over this unlike how K-pop fandom did this. To be honest, this really baffle me why international J-pop/J-music fandom didn't do anything like what I've described in the 2013 Universal Music K-pop MV removal backlash.

I mean let me break this down, I don't see a fan of J-rock sticking up or defend AKB48 whenever a scandal happened whereas a fan of Twice will defend BTS from whatever scandal breaks out of South Korea, this doesn't happened in J-pop/J-music fandom. To quote the AramaJapan article:

AramaJapan wrote:
I’ve noticed here and on other sites people saying that they have no plan to vote for Dempagumi.inc because they don’t like them and / or because they give Japanese music a bad image. But shouldn’t this be something Japanese music fans rally behind? I mean, KPop fans do this all the time. They’ll vote for an act they’re not a fan of simply to further the KPop cause. This is how Big Bang won Best Worldwide Act at the 2011 MTV EMA. This is how Girls’ Generation won Best Music Video at the YouTube Music Awards in 2013.

I don’t see Japanese music fans doing this. We won’t vote for an act simply because they’re Japanese. But should we change our thinking? Or should we just keep doing what we’re doing? Is voting for something, even though you don’t like it, a good way to further the pushing of Japanese music internationally?

People often talk about how Japanese music fans internationally aren’t unified, since there are so many kinds of Japanese music that we consume. What do an Ayumi Hamasaki fan and an ONE OK ROCK fan have in common besides them both being Japanese? What do a Sakanaction fan and an AKB48 fan have in common besides them both being Japanese? But should we get over this thinking? One thing that we’ve tried to do with Arama! Japan since our relaunch from LiveJournal is to be more mindful of the various style of Japanese music, in effort to create more unity. When there is more unity, you learn more things and get different perspectives.


This is exactly the big problem in J-Pop/J-music fandom. This is why J-pop probably couldn't get a western breakthrough. I've been in the K-pop fandom for 10 years, and I've seen K-pop, K-hip hop, K-rock, & K-indies fandom unite, I don't see this in J-pop/J-music fandom and yet it still baffle me to this day why there's a lack of unity when it comes to J-pop, J-rock/visual kei, and Anisongs.

-When K-pop in 2009/2010 started to gain more viral hit (this was before BTS, & Blackpink made it cool) like Super Junior's Sorry Sorry, & Girls Generation's Gee went viral. I was baffled why didn't any international J-pop fans (maybe one or 2 did, but I didn't become a K-pop fan until 2013) back then didn't raise a red flag about their fandom not being pro-active in making J-pop more known or more accessible. Case in point: SMTown's 2011 Paris concert sold out all their tickets, they have to create a 2nd concert date because of it being sold out, and that one also sold out after 10 minutes. I mean I understand the accessibility issues, but the J-pop/J-music fandom in general should've been able to launch a social media campaign and sending petition to Japanese music companies to make their music accessible and I would've assumed J-pop fandom would've cited K-pop's early western breakthrough including SMTown's 2011 concert in Paris as justification. I don't understand why no J-pop fan in the west ever tried this back then.

-Even now when K-pop make mainstream headline in the US/west, it's like many international fans of J-pop just abandon J-pop (I suspect many of them have crossover to K-pop and pretend that they were never a J-pop fans in the first place). I mean when you have someone that is both a J-pop/K-pop fan, I've never seen K-pop fandom trying to reach out to J-pop fanbase, or J-pop fans reaching out to K-pop to convince them to crossover to J-pop. I've heard of many J-pop fans crossing over to K-pop and they never went back to J-pop after that. I used to be active on Stage48 (an AKB48 fan forum), and it used to be big back then in 2013-2015, but after I think 2017/2018, I found out many users on Stage48 never return to there and it just been reduced to a very tiny userbases, and I'm not sure why. I think when AKB48 got involved in Produce48, I suspect maybe a lot of 48g wotas either left the fandom because it's now associating to K-pop, or maybe a lot of them may have crossover to K-pop and never return to AKB48/J-pop. I don't know, it just seem strange for international J-pop fans to just abandon J-pop just because of accessibility or the "if you can't beat them, join them" mentality.

-This is just my observation but...: When I started to talk to J-pop fans on sites like ANN, MAL, Stage48, and other sites/forums on why they think J-pop can't breakthrough into the west when K-pop could. They gave me reason like for example AKB48 & Morning Musume can't breakthrough in the western market because of the group having too many members (I want to note this was before Produce 101, and Produce48 was created) and yet when we have large K-pop groups like EXO, Seventeen, LOONA, Pristin (this group has now been disbanded since then), Momoland (the group has also disbanded recently) WJSN/Cosmic Girls, I.O.I, IZ*ONE getting more western fanbase then AKB48 or Morning Musume, these same J-pop fans couldn't explain why those K-pop boy & girl groups I mentioned was able to breakthrough when it comes to western fanbase when Morning Musume and AKB48 couldn't. I've also asked J-pop fans and showing them evidence about J-pop fandom reluctance to be pro-active in making J-pop accessible to wider audiences and asking them why international J-pop fan, and showing them evidence of K-pop breaking through in the west, and let me describe this:

A lot of the J-pop fans I talked to online couldn't even answer my questions regarding the music, and the fandom when I showed them the evidence. They never responded back to me like they feel ashamed or completely embarrassed of their fandom, I think 95% of the J-pop fandom I talked to online didn't respond/reply back to me. The one that I talked to (5%) and they responded back to me, they were baffled by whatever evidences I showed them, and there were some that agreed with me saying something like "Yeah, I agree with you mdo7, and this doesn't make sense to me".

It's not only J-music industry that dropped the ball, but the whole international J-pop fandom didn't do anything to respond to the rise of K-pop even back in 2009-2011 when that genre started to gain more high-profile mainstream spotlight and coverage (again, this was before BTS, and Blackpink sealed K-pop's worldwide fate).

So my question is not only for J-music industry, but what happened to the international J-pop fandom overall.

I'll end this post with this conclusion: Even if Crunchyroll was able to add music and concert video, it's too late. I don't think it can revive the J-pop/J-music fandom because of what K-pop has already did on a global scale. J-pop could've broke into the western market back in 2012/2013 or even in 2017/2018 but they missed that window of opportunity, and now look where we are today. BTS, Blackpink, Seventeen, Twice, and other K-pop group ended up becoming household names and breaking into Billboard's top 200 charts, and their music video can reached over 100+ million views in one day. I don't think J-pop/J-music nor it's international fandom can recovered from this ever.
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bagman



Joined: 14 Nov 2017
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 9:30 pm Reply with quote
Absolutely [expletive] praying we can get a video of tommy heavenly6 doing papermoon live
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DerekL1963
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Joined: 14 Jan 2015
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2023 1:04 am Reply with quote
Quote:
The service will also include features such as music video curation, artist listing page, and search integration. Crunchyroll will also launch a dedicated music landing page in the future.


In other words, it's a typical Crunchyroll half-ass rollout... Incomplete and will sometime in the future "include features" that any functional business would regard as absolute necessities pre-launch.

(Narrator voice: Don't hold your breath for those missing features either.)
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Fugaz-Star



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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2023 5:39 am Reply with quote
Hahaha, enjoy them before the price hike Laughing
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NJ_



Joined: 31 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2023 5:52 am Reply with quote
Ming Yi wrote:
Also, Arashi was Japan's biggest boy band in the 2010s and it was hard to find content of them if you weren't living in Japan, and they didn't get Twitter until 2020 when they were just about to disband.


They were also part of Johnny's which was a big reason why since a lot of changes there happened after it's founder died in 2019.
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Triltaison



Joined: 03 Jul 2011
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2023 3:10 pm Reply with quote
NJ_ wrote:
Ming Yi wrote:
Also, Arashi was Japan's biggest boy band in the 2010s and it was hard to find content of them if you weren't living in Japan, and they didn't get Twitter until 2020 when they were just about to disband.


They were also part of Johnny's which was a big reason why since a lot of changes there happened after it's founder died in 2019.


Yeah, I remember getting remarkably disinterested in the J-pop scene because of things like Johnny's stupid photo rules. Remember the live-action Fullmetal Alchemist movie poster where websites weren't allowed to show Ed, the main character? It's a super great way to promote your new film, hiring someone you can't show images of. No one would ever want to know what the main character of a popular franchise would look like in a new medium.

It was like pulling teeth to figure out who the heck SMAP was on the English side of the internet in the early '00s. I just gave up trying to acquire any knowledge on the matter after a while and went back to my old Nanase Aikawa CDs.
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