Music Loses Its Shape — The Day the Ringtone Sang

Last time, we saw an era when million-sellers came one after another, karaoke filled the streets, and music sold better in Japan than ever before. The silver disc called the CD was both a tool for listening and, at the same time, the very joy of ownership. Gazing at the jacket, flipping through the lyric booklet, lining them up on a shelf—music was a ‘thing’ you could touch with your hands.

And yet, at that very peak, the tide quietly began to turn. Domestic CD production is said to have reached its high point around 1998, and from then on it traced a path that was at first gradual and eventually unmistakably downhill. What we look at in this chapter is a decade or more of bewilderment and searching, as music stopped being a ‘thing’ and, losing its shape, went hunting for a new vessel.

Why the CD Stopped Selling

Why did the CD stop selling? There was not just one reason.

First, the very way people listened changed. In the late 1990s, technology for handling music files on personal computers spread, and people could extract the contents of a CD as data and carry them around. Once portable players holding compressed audio became common, people no longer needed to carry stacks of discs. On top of that, the habit of copying rented CDs at home was already said to be deeply rooted in Japan.

There were changes on society’s side as well. Mobile phone bills came to take up a large share of household budgets, and there is an argument that younger generations shifted their spending away from music and toward telecommunications. As entertainment itself diversified, music was placed in a position of competing with other pleasures over a limited disposable income.

The ‘Ringtone Song’ That Rang from Mobile Phones

In the midst of the decline, what appeared like a uniquely Japanese savior was the ‘ringtone song,’ the chaku-uta.

In December 2002, one of the mobile carriers launched a music delivery service that sold a few dozen seconds of a track—such as its chorus—as a ringtone. At a modest price of anywhere from a few dozen yen to around a hundred yen, a favorite song would play every time the phone rang—this small delight captured the hearts of young people in no time. By 2004, the ‘chaku-uta full,’ which let you take in not just the chorus but an entire song on your phone, appeared, and other companies followed one after another.

What made the chaku-uta interesting was that it was a culture that bloomed atop Japan’s own distinctive mobile-phone environment. A way of buying music that was completed in the palm of your hand, without going through a personal computer. Partly because a wide range of songs by major domestic artists was available, the chaku-uta market for a time gave off a strong presence. As CDs declined, the industry tried to find here a new pillar of revenue.

The Black Ship from Across the Sea, and Free Videos

Around the same time, another wave came surging from across the sea.

In 2005, a music delivery store for personal computers began service in Japan. This system, which let you easily buy songs one at a time, is said to have recorded sales of over a million tracks within just a few days of its launch. That said, at first the songs of major domestic artists were not sufficiently available, and there is said to have been a tug-of-war between rights holders and the delivery side over whether to license distribution. The overseas-born ‘black ship’ and the homegrown chaku-uta—two styles clashed over how to sell music as data.

And what shook the industry more fundamentally was the arrival of video-sharing services. As a place where anyone could post footage and anyone could watch for free spread on a global scale, music came pouring out there. Music videos, live footage, fan-made secondary videos—an environment where you could listen without buying became utterly ordinary.

From music you bought and owned, to music you took in by download. And beyond that, a sea of music flowing for free spread wide. This decade-plus was an era in which the ‘vessel’ of music was replaced one after another.

The Long Battle Against Illegal Downloading

The spread of an environment where you could listen for free naturally came with its shadows. ‘Illegal downloading’—obtaining tracks without properly paying for them—spread, and the industry took it as a grave threat.

In Japan, downloading illegally distributed music and video was positioned as illegal by a 2010 legal revision. Even so, no penalties were attached. The situation moved in a big way in 2012. The revised Copyright Act was enacted and took effect, and the act of downloading paid music and the like while knowing it was illegal came to be subject to criminal penalties.

Enforcement alone could not stop the flow. Within parts of the industry, a way of thinking also began to bud: rather than simply treating places where you could listen for free as an enemy, they should be taken in as legitimate distribution and turned into a source of revenue. In a world premised on ‘being able to listen for free,’ how do you circulate the rewards of creation? A full-fledged answer to that question would take shape a little further down the road.

After Letting Go of the ‘Thing’

Looking back on this chapter, Japanese music in the 2000s comes into view as one great story of loss and searching. What was lost was the easy-to-grasp shape of an industry that had revolved around the CD as a ‘thing.’ The world that had stood on making one disc, selling one disc, and stacking those up, crumbled at its footing amid the waves of data and free access.

But that did not mean a decline of music itself. Chaku-uta rang, delivery stores opened, videos flowed—the channels for listening, if anything, increased, and music dissolved into every corner of daily life. The problem was not that music ‘stopped being listened to,’ but that ‘the way it was listened to and the way money flowed became entirely different things.’

Music that had lost its shape spent a while unable to find a new vessel suited to it. From ownership, from downloading, to what lay beyond—where would music settle, reconciling reward and freedom? The answer was still in the mist. The idea of an all-you-can-listen subscription that would eventually arrive would bring a kind of punctuation to this long search. The leading role in music was about to change hands once again, on a grand scale.