I feel almost guilty admitting it, but these behaviour seems completely natural to me. Paper books, music on CDs. Seems to me much more rational to buy something like this, than buying (heck, it's not even buying, it's more like renting by some weird license!) array of bytes, that can be deleted by some Apple or Amazon from your device, and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD! It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!
And, well, I'm a bit missing these times when you could exchange CDs with your friends and all that kind of stuff. But dismiss it. However ability to not have CD-ROM in your notebook is major bonus. And size of portable music players as well.
I wonder if paper books are as expensive in Japan as in the western countries.
Amazon and Apple both sell DRM-free audio files, which is no different than buying and ripping a CD, minus having the superfluous physical disc lying around. They can't be deleted from your device.
I think I've ripped my entire audio collection 3 or 4 times now. Back in the day I was naively convinced M4A would displace MP3. And depending on the disk size of the day, I've ripped with various bit rates (not necessarily VBR). Amazon and Apple seem to give you high quality rips these days, but I like having the flexibility of going back to the source material as needed.
Also, I guess I'm increasingly in the minority, but I really enjoy reading liner notes.
It would be a lot easier to buy more storage and just buy digital lossless copies of all your music. The extra cost would be more than made up for in the time savings from not having to rerip your audio collection so many times.
Sure. I don't recall anyone selling anything over 160 kbps in 2004. Apple introduced their lossless encoding around then, but extra storage for that many discs was prohibitively expensive. I think Amazon is still ~250 kbps and doesn't offer lossless at all.
Fortunately, I haven't had to rerip in a while. And if I really wanted to throw in the towel, services like Murfie exist that will take your collection and rip for you in a variety of formats. But, having physical CDs really doesn't bother me either.
For random songs, I use the amazon store, which I am very happy with - the ability to download a plain old, DRM-free mp3 file is a consumer-friendly environment that I would not have predicted in this day and age.
However, if I want an album, I always buy and rip the CD to WAV/PCM. It's the real, unprocessed, uncompressed (lossy or lossless) bits of the CD, and I know of no other way to get those.
In my opinion, unless you have the PCM of the cd track, you will buy or rip that song again. This way you have it for good.
Why the hell would you rip it to WAV/PCM and not FLAC? You'll save on the order of 80% space without losing any quality; you can always convert the FLAC right back to WAV without anything being different.
However, there are other ways to get those as well. Bandcamp offers downloads in flac, mp3, ogg, and others. If the album isn't on bandcamp, or some other site that offers flac copies, then you can illegally pirate flac content from some-of-a-few audiophile websites.
I'm quite a fan of bandcamp and I'd highly recommend seeing if you can find good music there.
Not every use case involves a system that can play FLAC files, but just about everything can play a WAV file. For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.
Again, having the WAV file means I never have to touch that music again. Ever.
I used to play flac files on my Octane (300 MHz,1 CPU). Given how little load it caused, I'd expect it to work well on a O2 180mhz r5k. Perhaps you are using an older still iris machine though?
While just about any device can play .wav, many devices have so little storage that I find myself ripping on flac, the re-encoding to something lossy and lower bit rate to get a reasonable amount onto a mobile device.
> For instance, one of my desktops is Irix on MIPS which I can play WAV files on, but not fancy things like FLAC.
Why would that be? libFLAC has IRIX support since ~2002, and computational power certainly isn't the issue, there used to be (and may still be) devices with <100MHz ARM chips doing real-time FLAC decoding in software (using just libFLAC).
This is one thing that I really dislike about digital music stores - the fact that most of them don't offer a lossless option at all, and in the rare chance that they do, it usually costs extra, even though it really should come by default (because sheesh, it's what we've been getting on CDs for ages). Bandcamp is one of the few exceptions that get at least this thing right by offering a variety of options for a single price with lossless being one of them.
By the way, there's no reason to keep stuff around as WAV/PCM, it'll be just as lossless as FLACs (and thus can be further transcoded with no issue whatsoever) and you can actually tag the stuff like that too.
This is true, but the hard-drive music player seems to be on its way out now as well, with the iPod Classic gone and Apple moving toward the streaming market or "cloud" model, where they have ultimate control over the user's access to the content. While I'm not a CD junkie, I find myself clinging to the model you mention, because I am not eager to hand over control to a company that continually required me to pay. For those are a fan of Spotify: you pay $10/month for access to millions(?) of songs, but what happens when Spotify goes under, or gets bought? You've been paying for, let's say, 3 years - $360 - and what do you have to show for it? I much prefer sinking that amount of money into backing up my music collection.
> You've been paying for, let's say, 3 years - $360 - and what do you have to show for it?
The answer is 3 years of music enjoyment.
Honestly, this seems like a terrible example - I don't think anybody pays for spotify on the basis that they will have the music forever, it's very explicitly a rental service. Instead, people pay because it's the most convenient (including being cheap) way to access the music they want.
> While I'm not a CD junkie, I find myself clinging to the model you mention, because I am not eager to hand over control to a company that continually required me to pay
This doesn't really make sense either. If you don't like rental services, don't pay for them, buy the albums just like you always did - it's easy to buy DRM free mp3s nowadays.
And, too, the collaborative experience that Spotify brings. I neglected to consider that. While very little money goes to the artists, the "sharing" aspect of Spotify is something that many people value and gladly pay for. Personally, I find that aspect too involved (I'm an albums person, not a playlist person) but from a marketing perspective this might be better for artists than physical media. I'm still too possessive for the rent-a-song method. What happened when I sign on and the music I like it out of license? Much better for me to have it as near to me as possible.
Years ago there was a local used record store in my town that offered a "trial" period on any album purchased. If you "didn't like" the album you could return it for a small "restocking" fee. Unsurprisingly this store also had a good business in the sale of blank cassette tapes.
What prevents someone from doing the same thing with Spotify? Play music on one device, record it on another using audio patch cables if needed. Or maybe it isn't even that hard, just record the audio signal right out of the audio card in your PC. Is this prevented somehow?
It's not prevented. You don't even need to go that far -- there are programs that will get the ogg files directly from Spotify. I'm not going to link to them, but I trust you'll find one with sufficient google-fu.
At $120/year, Spotify is much more expensive than most people's annual music budget.[0] It might be convenient, but it certainly isn't cheap. At least with individual album purchases, you are building 'equity' in a music collection $10 at a time.
Then those people probably don't want to pay for spotify. I didn't mean to imply that spotify is automatically a good deal for everyone, obviously it isn't, but I think it's plausibly a good deal for a lot of people.
> but it certainly isn't cheap
I'll admit, I was speaking more from the perspective of listening to a lot of music. For instance, the combined purchase value of all the albums in my spotify playlists far exceeds the total amount I ever spent on spotify, though I haven't used it for a while. I'm sure there are many people for whom this is true, even if they aren't a large proportion of the whole population.
In general you're right of course, 'cheap' is a matter of perspective. Spotify is not cheap for everyone, but it is potentially cheap for plenty of people. I still don't see the problem with this.
Isn't the fall of the hard-drive music player just because phones do that? I buy digital tracks rather than streaming (particularly since the whole point of most of my music is to listen while on the Underground), but my MP3 player sits gathering dust, because my phone can do that and more.
You also miss the booklet and liner notes. Whether this matters is probably genre-specific. Jazz in particular has more meta-data than is ever encoded in an mp3, and if it was encoded, players don't support showing it. Classical has the same issue.
Prices are generally higher than in North America. Most of the CDs that I would buy in the US for around $15-20 is anywhere from ¥2450-5400. Additionally, most of the "extras" are just advertising fluff. Books are priced similarly to the US, but the majority of them are Japan's version of trade paperbacks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkobon) – thin paper cover, cheap thin pages, small format, and wrapped at the register with an additional protective cover (usually with the store logo). Nicer hardcover books seem to be priced about the same as in the US. The biggest thing going for the whole industry (despite everything feeling so cheap) is that there is a book for everything. Manuals for open source software, a biography for some barely known musician, etc.– and you can actually find them browsing a regular Sanseido, Yurindo, or Kinokuniya.
My rational to it is that I have enough clutter, in my house and on my hard drive, that I don't need to add to it with stacks of CDs or GBs of hard drive space. You and the Japanese should meditate on the nature of impermanence, everything in the physical world is rented so your music should be too ;)
>> "heck, it's not even buying, it's more like renting by some weird license!)"
Nearly all the music I've bought online in the last 5 years has been DRM free which means I can play it on any device and nobody can delete it. I bought it, I own it. It's not rented.As for sharing with you friends that doesn't happen very often but mainly I think because it's easier for them to just get their own copy than meet me to borrow mine. When it was more common to borrow media from people that was not only because it was free but because they would have to travel to a shop, and if that shop didn't have it, travel to another and another until they found it. Now they can own it in seconds.
I have no love lost for CDs, but I still buy Vinyl, and the best thing about Vinyl is that the majority of new albums also come with a digital download, best of both worlds. At home I listen to the Vinyl for the experience but on the go I have my phone with MP3s that no one can touch but me.
I do the same thing, trying to buy most new stuff on vinyl that has the digital downloads. I also have a ton of older records - Opera and Jazz mostly. I also have a large collection of 80s New Wave / Dance 12 inch remixes, most of which you cannot find digitally. The Recordman in Redwood City, CA is a good place to find stuff.
> and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD!
A lot of e-books are either half off or more than their physical counterparts. Also when you're buying technical books, their electronic versions will get updated and you buy and get access to e-books in draft form which is pretty useful for bleeding edge tech.
It's also pretty cool to be able to fit your entire library in your pocket.
Everything said, I still would never buy the digital version of art books and coffee table books and I still own the physical copies of the books I really like. I tend to buy digital copies more as an accessory.
The digital copies definitely should be cheaper when you consider the cost of producing and shipping CDs... which is why I download them from Youtube since apparently artists get paid this way (thank you youtube-dl)
I've come to hate physical media and I rarely buy it. Music is drm-free now and when I buy ebooks I only buy ones where I can crack the drm so I don't have to worry about licenses being revoked or drm servers going offline.
I've also moved a lot so carrying a couple hard drives is much easier than boxes and boxes of books and cds - let alone people that collect vinyl.
Often buying a used CD on amazon is cheaper than buying the album on itunes or amazon download. Sad but true. I admit I also enjoy the packaging for music I care about.
>It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!
The main thing that's crazy is really the digital distribution systems available to us. If all we have is some DRM-crippled products, then you can't actually buy things digitally - merely rent them for an undefined period of time. Luckily, there are at least some things you can buy without DRM (music does pretty decently in this regard, games somewhat), but on the whole the situation is rather gloomy (especially with anything video). And while I do like the catalog rental model that services like Netflix offer with their subscriptions, at the very least I would like to be able to digitally buy the things I really like, which is flat-out impossible in many cases.
Being from Japan, I have a few thoughts in this area:
* A significant percentage of music is still only available on CD, and not in digital media. Until recently, music from one company (say Sony) was only available from their digital music store, which had their own player app with their own DRM. These things create significant inconvenience to the consumers, hindering the adoption of digital music.
* The music industry in Japan came up with a brilliant business model that enabled them to sell the same CD multiple times to the same consumer, basically by bundling a ticket to each CD. Sometimes a single ticket grants you one vote, sometimes you get one piece of (say 12) tickets randomly and you need to complete all 12 pieces to get something. This forces loyal fans to buy 10s and sometimes 100s of the same CD.
It's not like people are carrying around portable CD players any more, so these factors obviously creates a rapidly diminishing music fan base. I still hope that eventually the decline in the CD business will force the industry to wholy embrace the digial music, but I'm not holding my breath.
>The music industry in Japan came up with a brilliant business model that enabled them to sell the same CD multiple times to the same consumer, basically by bundling a ticket to each CD. Sometimes a single ticket grants you one vote, sometimes you get one piece of (say 12) tickets randomly and you need to complete all 12 pieces to get something. This forces loyal fans to buy 10s and sometimes 100s of the same CD.
I don't understand what you mean by tickets and votes. It sounds really interesting, and I'd be grateful if you could elaborate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKB48
Basically every "season", fans get to vote on their favorite member of huge roaster-pop group that J-pop has pioneered.
"The group has publicized special events to choose the promotional and recording lineups for some of its singles.[191] In 2009, the concept of sōsenkyo (総選挙?, "general elections") was introduced.[19] To obtain a ballot, voters must purchase the group's latest "election single."[192] Members who receive the most votes will participate in the recording of AKB48's next single[19] and are heavily promoted,[5] with the top vote-getter the centerpiece of the group's live performances.[191][192] Votes in the 2011 election exceeded one million, and the single "Everyday, Katyusha" (which contained a ballot for the election) set a Japanese record for weekly sales of a CD single.[193] The 2012 election had nearly 1.4 million votes,[191] and the 2013 election had 2.6 million votes.[194] Fans have reportedly bought hundreds (or thousands) of copies of singles to vote for their favorite members."
What's interesting is that each physical copy of Taylor Swift's latest album, 1989, includes 1 of 5 possible sets of 13 polaroids[0], and it's set to have the biggest sales week (in the US, presumably) of any album since 2002[1]. I wonder if she didn't steal this idea from AKB48.
It's about idol groups (big groups of singers/dancers, usually girls), where fans can vote the singer that gets the most attention[1], who represents the group at different occasions or who will join next. Because the votes are usually tied to a CD, the logistics of crazy fans can be complex, as they buy cartloads[2].
Thanks for explaining. It's crazy, but on some level I have to admire it. They found a way to extract the hidden value of the long tail of super-fans. It's like the "whales" in gaming that spend huge amounts to buy various extras.
The voting is something unique (I think) to AKB48, where for the last 6 years they have an annual event where fans get to vote for which performers will be in the singles. I believe in the last election there were 200+ participants, including all the '48' family groups and training members. http://stage48.net/wiki/index.php/Senbatsu_Election
The tickets usually refer to hand-shake events where you can meet and shake hands with members of the group.
Another hook is including different DVDs in each of several versions of a single, for example Making of videos, close up versions of the video, dance versions, etc. I have seen up to 6 different versions of the same single.
Looking at the number of votes - y axis - on this visualization I made might giv you some sense of how much the volumes involved in this tactic have changed. It's big business.
As an avid listener to K-Pop and j-Pop, i regularly buy the CDs. The Japanese have this idea of "fan service" executed better than the western media outlets. A regular CD from most western music artists contains a jewel case, maybe a sleeve with a few copyrights, and the CD. The last J-pop album I bought contained a CD, DVD, 30 or so page picture book, and stickers. Often where i buy these cds from they also throw in posters. Its a far more fun experience.
Sony was the big elephant in the room when talking about digital music. Is it 3 or 4 years now since they cave in and started to distribute through iTunes as well ?
The same phenomenon is going on for ebooks, where it's still heavily balkanised but it's clear the eventually most of the stores will go down and ignoring the biggest players (Amazon I guess ?) won't make sense.
I think the bets are still off concerning DVD/BD distribution, as they are still used to balance the profits on TV series for instance. On this front it's funny to see a very small number of production companies tipping their toes in crowdfunding (and being pushed to use kickstarter for instance...) to see if it would work for them.
I live nearby in Asia, and local friends describe their reason for buying CDs as "something to collect" or, as having a piece of the artist's creation to actually hold. Even if online music is accessible, it doesn't give that feeling of "ownership" after spending money.
> local friends describe their reason for buying CDs as "something to collect"
Also japanese CDs generally bundle lots of extras, it's not just a plastic disc and a 1-ply cover art, they tend to get extensive liner notes, DVD extras, event tickets (e.g. "hand shake" tickets in jpop CDs), etc… And really neat collector boxsets tend to be much more common and normal than in the west e.g. this: http://aap.blackaris2001.org/AlienHead/Alien25thAnniversaryC... was their Alien 25th Anniversary Collection boxset
It's not just digital music downloads in Japan which are not taking off. Ebooks are still far from reaching any significant share on the market, and a large part is coming from the lack of cooperation of the publishers who refuse to have digital versions of their paper books. It's a completely locked market in many regards with decisions made by risk-averse companies and company presidents. I have never seen Japan as modern when it comes to Internet services / downloads and the like. They seem to be permanently stuck in old habits (Yahoo is still the main web page they use on a daily basis), registration heavy services (needing 7 steps from beginning to the point where you are able to log in) and web pages that still look like 1.0 era.
Part of the reason for this is that ebook formatting/typesetting tends to be terrible in logographic languages. I don't know why, but typesetting in the ebook world is much worse there. I have a Japanese friend who complains constantly about any ebook she gets.
Typesetting for English language ebooks is pretty dreadful too. And for older titles, they're usually littered with OCR errors too. I'd be surprised if they receive more than a couple of hours of QA.
I am pleased that someone else has noticed this. I recently purchased a copy of the Neal Stephenson book "Cryptonomicon" and it's full of errors where a word was hyphenated in the original text, but the digital text has replaced the hyphen with a space. You get words like "Pat tern"; I'm shocked at how little they bothered to proof read the digital versions before they sent it out. I'm inclined to ask for a refund.
I had the same problem when I read The Selfish Gene, it was littered with weird line breaks, OCR errors and general layout strangeness. So much so that I went through it myself and fixed most of it because it annoyed me too much.
I would actually much prefer ebooks for Japanese, because then you could turn furigana on/off, or on to various degrees (according to your reading level).
I'm not saying that it's currently implemented in any existing ebook format (I don't know if it is or isn't). But it would be a clear advantage of ebooks for reading Japanese.
I have bought several ebooks in Japanese and had no problem whatsoever with the formatting. You can actually adjust about everything in the kindle as long as it comes with a mobi file.
She may be running into bad luck, or she might just be technologically illiterate on the ebook front. I've never really dug into her issues with ebooks as I wouldn't know where to start.
Or maybe she is just more aesthetically sensitive. Good book typography is pretty complicated thing and is done manually, so it couldn't be done adjusting stuff like line height and font size in the settings of your ebook. I don't really give much attention to such things, but if you'll show your ebook reader to some typography-savvy friend of yours, he could point out quite a lot moments about "why this kind of typography sucks". Or, well, you could just take some old book with good typesetting and carefully compare it yourself to what you see on the screen of your ebook reader. Difference is pretty obvious.
Isn't that the reason TeX was created though to be able to automatically generate good typography for a document? Couldnt the algorithims used in TeX to decide these features just be used by eBook readers?
> Ebooks are still far from reaching any significant share on the market […] I have never seen Japan as modern when it comes to Internet services / downloads and the like.
Cellphone novels are a full-fledged literary genre in japan. As is oft noted, the future is not evenly distributed.
There was hope when the iPad was released that it would act as a kurofune for the Japanese publishing industry[0], but that of course has not come to pass. However, I have found a surprising number of books on the Japanese Kindle store as of late.
Yeah, there are more, but still the most successful authors like 東野けいご are nowhere to be found, and authors like him sells millions of books every year.
This is something that really annoys me, as this kind of averse attitude to online distribution is also prevalent among Japanese indie (doujin) musicians. They release their albums only physically, first during doujin events and then to various shops. You might be able to buy the albums physically from some Japanese web stores, but then you get hit with damn expensive import fees (so better buy a lot of stuff at the same time), not to mention any potential customs fees (which are easy to get when buying a lot of stuff at the same time). And since the physical copies are also limited, trying to get older albums legitimately can be pretty much impossible.
What makes it all even more annoying is that it's not like the artists would be completely unaware of digital music services - they post samples to Soundcloud, and some might even sell an album or two on Bandcamp, but the vast majority of everything is just completely unavailable in any legitimate digital manner. Of course, most of it is available via less legitimate sources, but that has its obvious downsides, like not having any idea when new releases will actually become available. Just a week ago an album I'm really looking forward to[1] was released physically during a doujin event. If that was available on Bandcamp, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but since it's not, I'm forced to wait for who knows how long before I even get to listen to the damn thing proper.
Doesn't this music cater to the "I'm going to judge music partly based on how the artists decide to distribute it" crowd? That has nothing to do with musicianship or sound.
It might be a psychological hack to cause more people to become superfans by drawing out the obsessive compulsive desire to collect rare artifacts (which happen to be music CDs in this case).
>That has nothing to do with musicianship or sound.
So? Music is not just about musicianship or sound, and art even less so.
It's an experience, and how you approach that experience is equally important.
That's also why Joe Satriani or some poser like Yngwie Malmsteen are no "better" than someone like BB King, nor is a pristeen sounding acid-jazz Blueray better than some crappy sounding Alan Lomax recordings.
>It might be a psychological hack to cause more people to become superfans by drawing out the obsessive compulsive desire to collect rare artifacts (which happen to be music CDs in this case).
Even more common is the psychological compulsion to just download or buy stuff and amass a huge collection which you're never gonna hear more than 1-2 times...
I agree the reality is people judge music by the experience and not the sound, but isn't that silly?
Isn't it a bit circular if the best music in your or my opinion becomes the music that we most fervently collect or go to concerts of (possibly because friends do), and then we continue fervently collecting it or attending concerts because "it's the best music"?
I seem to recall that various US agencies still require fax, because it is an approved legal document. I suspect something similar is in effect in Japan. Heck, South Korea is pretty much stuck on IE because they produced a national e-commerce solution based on ActiveX back in the day. Tech quickly outrun law, especially communications tech.
yes there are situations where faxes are needed in the USA. As I understand it mostly is in cases regarding legal documents. In the NYTimes article i linked in the previous post though they talk about individuals still buying fax machines and people preferring to fax their lunch orders to a restaurant instead of doing it on a website.
From the article: "The Japanese government’s Cabinet Office said that almost 100 percent of business offices and 45 percent of private homes had a fax machine as of 2011. "
I would be surprised if 10% of private homes in the USA have a fax machine.
Keep in mind the marginal cost of getting a phone-fax instead of a regular phone for home here (Japan) is practically zero.
A fax machine (or a landline for that matter) in the home isn't for me, but they're still moving down the development curve, releasing new features, improving quality and lowering costs.
I have heard on more than one occasion the popularity of the consumer-level fax is tied to the importance placed on skillful handwriting. I have pointed out that there was no way the skillfulness of one's handwriting could be relayed via fax, and noted that there was a certain twisted irony in the fact that a once-new technology remained popular because of something so traditional.
In the last 12 months I have required to use a fax machine about four times here. Twice for a group booking (baseball, riverboat cruise), and twice to send stuff back to my own government in Australia. In all these cases a scanned PDF was confirmed not acceptable.
They're totally allowed to - consumers just will not use online solutions. The example from the article was a food delivery business that takes orders by fax, and (completely legally) tried to take orders online instead. Customers just didn't pick it up.
A couple of questions I have...does Japan also resist the movement towards online gaming purchases? Nintendo and Sony offer pretty robust online delivery services...are they as popular in Japan as in the U.S.?
> Yuichiro Sugahara learned the hard way about his country’s deep attachment to the fax machine, which the nation popularized in the 1980s. A decade ago, he tried to modernize his family-run company, which delivers traditional bento lunchboxes, by taking orders online. Sales quickly plummeted.
Today, his company, Tamagoya, is thriving with the hiss and beep of thousands of orders pouring in every morning, most by fax, many with minutely detailed handwritten requests like “go light on the batter in the fried chicken” or “add an extra hard-boiled egg.”
“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” said Mr. Sugahara, 43.
I would say that all the current generation consoles have pretty much the exact same game purchasing capabilities. If anything, the Xbox One is the worst due to how bizarrely confusing browsing the store is on it. The PS Store and eShop are much nicer to use.
Nintendo certainly does not compete here. I don't know the ins and outs of Playstation Network and Xbox Live well enough to really judge, but Nintendo's... whatever, is not in the same league. They still haven't managed to even separate the end-user from the console he owns. If what they offer is 'robust' I want to know what isn't robust.
"The discussion started off well enough and covered off our experiences with the hardware and (slow) toolchain and then we steered them towards discussing when the online features might be available. We were told that the features, and the OS updates to support them, would be available before the hardware launch, but only just. There were apparently issues with setting up a large networking infrastructure to rival Sony and Microsoft that they hadn't envisaged.
This was surprising to hear, as we would have thought that they had plenty of time to work on these features as it had been announced months before, so we probed a little deeper and asked how certain scenarios might work with the Mii friends and networking, all the time referencing how Xbox Live and PSN achieve the same thing. At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them? My only thought after this call was that they were struggling - badly - with the networking side as it was far more complicated than they anticipated. They were trying to play catch-up with the rival systems, but without the years of experience to back it up.
As promised, (just) before the worldwide launch we received the final networking features that we required for our game along with an OS update for the development kits that would allow us to test. So we patched up our code and tried to start testing our game.
First up we had to flash the kits to the retail mode that had the Mii and network features. This was a very complicated manual process that left the consoles in a halfway state. In the retail mode we could test our features and ensure that they worked as expected, which would be a requirement for getting through Nintendo certification, but in this mode the debugging capabilities were limited. So we could see when things went wrong, but we couldn't fully debug to find out why. As developers, we had to make a choice and hope that any issues that you found were due to the (untested) OS code and wouldn't happen in the final retail environment. What should have been simple tasks were long-winded and error prone. Simple things like sending a friends request to another user were not supported in the OS, so you had to boot a separate program on the console manually, via a debug menu, so that you could send one. But if any error occurred there was no way to debug why it had failed, it just failed.
We started to ask questions about how they could possibly launch the console, which was a matter of weeks away, with a partially developed OS. How were they going to get the OS onto all of the consoles that had been manufactured up to that point? Was it just that we got it late, but they had pushed it into the production line earlier?
Launch day came around and the answer became clear: Nintendo was late - very late - with its network systems. In fact, the only way to access their systems fully was to download a big patch on day one that added all these missing components. Without that patch a lot of the release titles would have been only semi-functional."
>At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!)
No surprise there. Giri is still a very real thing in Japan, tho it is fading slowly with the generations.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's, and the first music I ever bought was on cassettes. Fortunately CD's came out when I was in middle school, so I was buying CDs when I really started building my own music collection.
I remember filling my shelves with CD cases, and I remember noticing that I wasn't listening to my full range of music because of the friction of having to switch physical discs. Then my friend and I each bought a 400-disc carousel player [0]. That thing was magical - suddenly we could listen to any song we had ever bought at the press of a few buttons. I remember using Access to make a database of all my music, so I could easily listen to anything I wanted to.
Around 2006 I bought a 30GB ipod, and I methodically ripped every CD in the 400-disc changer, which I had completely filled. I remember writing to my friend and telling him that every song in that changer was now in my pocket. It was another revolution in making all my music available with even less friction.
Fast forward to today, and what do I have? I'm still listening to music on my 2006 ipod. I'm stuck there because I don't use itunes anymore, but my old ipod still works. I haven't made the time to update my approach to organizing music. I had a dream just last night that my ipod burned up, and I had to figure out a new way to listen to music.
I'll dedicate some time in the next year or two to organize my music outside of itunes. I still have all my old CDs, so I could rip them again if there's reason to do so.
Music has been changing formats for the last 100+ years. It's a bit of work to keep up with the changing formats, but I am always grateful that we have easy access to our entire collection of music at the touch of a few buttons.
Edit: I also lived in NYC in the 90's, and I miss going to Tower Records and HMV and getting lost in there for hours at a time.
Two things I gathered from living with Japanese exchange students in the late 90's:
1. CD's are much more expensive in Japan than in other parts of the world - typical prices are in the $25-30 USD range. The ~$1/song doesn't really work over there.
2. Japan has (or had) CD rental stores. Like the Blockbuster of yore, you can go and rent a CD, take it home, copy it to minidisc (this is late 90's japan, remember!), then listen to it forever. This was quite common - one of my roomies had a case of about 100 minidiscs that were all copies from rentals.
So, the market is really different over there - minidisc and laserdisc both caught on to significant degrees, whereas it didn't anywhere else.
On the flip side, their national broadcaster has been really slow to invest in internet streaming, or push online access, with 60% of weekly Japanese NHK news consumers claiming they didn't even know NHK had a website:
http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/english/reports/pdf/10_no8_07.pd...
Maybe CDs vs. streaming is in some ways Sony vs. Apple, and there are factors like national pride, domestic market control, and local branding dominance that play a role in the choice of technologies, rather than just products. Even so, always fascinating to see weird exogenous factors (beyond performance / capacity / etc.) tip a market.
array of bytes, that can be deleted by some Apple or Amazon from your device, and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD! It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!
I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to have the best of both worlds here? What if there was a service that could act as a depository of your physical media? You could mail them boxes of stuff, which they'd keep someplace like a warehouse in Reno. The service could require that you use special packaging to reduce their costs. You'd also be able to request digitized versions, up to some fixed number of requests per month. Of course, the types of media would be limited. I would start with CDs, DVDs, and books.
I remember when I was about 23 and anticipating moving out into my first apartment - in Manhattan no less! - I would go into Tower Records and browse for CDs to buy. It was a symbol for me of my independence and ability to select my taste in music, for my pad. There was a time when having a collection meant something. I missed the vinyl generation, but a few years after I had already bought probably $200 worth of CDs, Steve Jobs did that major thing - disrupting the music industry by introducing iTunes.
No one else had been able to pull it off before - the record industry knew it was a different businsss model, and this was one of Steve's massive business coups. Music was being shared as files online - this gave businesses a legal way to compete with that. Apple launched the whole "1000 songs in your pocket" industry.
Today, for most people, it's no longer about your song collection. Tower Records has closed along with and the disruption of the physical delivery continues apace, led by Amazon and its massive consumer power. The future is squeezing of publishers, which will need to find their own ways to collectivize. But this is the macroeconomics of it. I want to mention the social impact on the individual level.
I no longer download songs to iTunes, or rip them, except for the times I go traveling or on a cruise. Music has become a social phenomenon, and for that it is better to have a free legal music source IN THE CLOUD. I just had a house party and we used a simple web app I created a few years back called YouMixer (http://youmixer.com) that uses the YouTube API as a source of free, legal music and lets everyone contribute to the playlist.
Facebook has since broke the login, and I have to recode that app. But creating a music mix works, everyone gets to add their songs and hear them at the party, and I think this is the future. Your preferences and songs following you where you go, so listenng to music is a social event unconstrained by downloading collections. I believe paintings will follow the same pattern in the next 5-10 years, and new formats for players - both audio and visual - will appear which will help usher in this social phenomenon.
I've converted back to physical CDs from buying digital music and love it for a few reasons:
* A lot of music I buy actually ends up being the same price for the CD.
* I can still rip it at any quality I like into any format I like (I use abcde to rip to ogg). I keep all my music on Dropbox and sync it between my phone, home machines and work machine.
* I'm a collector and I like displaying my music in my house, and guests sometimes like to have a browse and borrow them.
I agree with the notion that having CD's bring a more personal attachment to the product. For example i'm still looking forward to buying the dead tree version of TAOCP, though i agree that searching will be a bit faster on an ebook. Not sure if reading TAOCP requires you to move around too much or its more on reading it allows you to concentrate and focus on one chapter at a time.
I visited the Sound Gallery* in Austin, Texas recently. The owner talked at length of the continual transition of lessening quality audio mediums in exchange for widespread. High-fidelity analog to vinyl to cassettes to cds to mp3s to.. streaming. Paraphrasing: "You don't own a stream. You can't hold it in your hands -- you can't drop it and break it. But it sounds like shit."
"Not pirating like foreigners" is actually a source of pride for some groups. Japanese anime otaku and Japanese adult video enthusiasts have respectively criticised their (self-styled) western counterparts who tend to pirate the anime and adult movies instead of supporting the creators.
The entire anime industry is pretty much the worst thing ever, economics wise.
The companies behind the anime (And there are generally a lot - not just the production studio) invest the money to produce it, /and/ to book the slot that it airs on. Anime ratings aren't great for the vast majority of shows, and the TV networks would rather just pump out a cheap talk show or similar and get better ratings if they're left in charge of things.
So, now you've got the show produced, have booked a time slot, and start airing your show. You're not making money off of the advertising. Where do you make your money, then?
Merchandising and dvd/blu-ray sales. So this results in the ridiculous quantity of merchandise anime series have.
And then the blu-ray/dvd sales. These are what really drives the market, and it's completely ludicrous. A season will be released piece by piece, 2-4 episodes at a time, for $30-$60 each. Buying a copy of both seasons of Fate/Zero, for example, would cost you $591
The sales of these pieced out dvds/blu-rays basically determine the life of a show - at a time where only the domestic market is purchasing. Streams like Crunchyroll have basically zero bearing on how the committees running the show view it's success. If domestic sales are good, a sequel is likely to be made. If domestic sales are bad, even if it is an absolute runaway hit elsewhere (and I mean fairly universally - something could sell well in China, the US, etc etc etc and if it didn't do well in Japan, it's still dead)
Add all of that together, and there's really zero incentive for westerners (Or any non-Japanese market) to not pirate anime, outside of the whole "contributing financially [in an extremely diminished capacity] to the people who made the product you enjoy".
About the only time they take notice of international success at all is when it's a ridiculous runaway, like Bleach, Naruto, etc.
As a buyer of many games on steam, especially ridiculously expensive 20 year old games, I long to purchase the actual CD case along with manual, cover art, everything.
And, well, I'm a bit missing these times when you could exchange CDs with your friends and all that kind of stuff. But dismiss it. However ability to not have CD-ROM in your notebook is major bonus. And size of portable music players as well.
I wonder if paper books are as expensive in Japan as in the western countries.