The Yard Sale
Just going through the thousands of things in my various feeds and ran across this on Pikasha’s blog post:
At the guest reception at Sakuracon, we saw this adoring Nagahama’s table. He said it’s a hand-made gift from a fan. I hope you realize this, fan person!
Chocolates makes a great treat and souvenir in Seattle. I should’ve brought home some.
In the mid to late 00s there has been an anison boom. The question is has it cooled since 2010? With the 8th Animax Anison Grand Prix canned this year, what do we make of it? How about Love Live S2 OP sales breaking records? Or the way different anison artists “being dropped” by different things? It’s intriguing.
Thankfully, someone already wrote it up, so I don’t have to.
My own opinion of this is that, like all musical artists, the way people make a living vary depending on where you are at on the chain. As a “live lover” I appreciate solid acts and people who can put on a good show. Thing is, a lot of anison artists during the boom are hardly that different than the seiyuu idols themselves that are now replacing them, in terms of exactly that–their live abilities. Then there are those who are notably better, invariably because that’s their bag to begin with; they are the Angela’s and LiSA’s of the bunch; the super robot singers (because seiyuu are not quite there yet?); and the singer-song-writers (which includes bands like Angela too, but also Nano.ripe, Ali Project and Yousei Teitoku. And the occasional ZAQ).
I’m not sure if we can make a distinction between the seiyuu idols who are now more like regular artists versus “idols” who are seiyuu, like StylipS or Sphere for example. I mean I enjoy all their shows, but the way I enjoy say a Nana Mizuki live is not going to be the same as how I enjoy IM@S. It’s harder to get that drooling, wallet-opening fanbase going if you are Maaya Sakamoto versus the newly debuting Azusa Tadakoro. You know?
But I’m not really worried. I think anison is no different than other categories of music as far as market and culture is concerned. It might contract or expand in cycles like everything else, and we’re probably just seeing that play out. Maybe this is why when JAM Project tours the world, their message to us is that they want the anison base to expand. So it can accommodate more artists?
So. How about that I’VE SOUND 15th Anniversary?
Maybe meg rock should tweet more in English…
What’s amazing about Niconico Chokaigi is that it isn’t just “Japanese internet vomited into one place” (Makuhari Messe being the barf bag), even if that in itself is a big deal in a “this is why you can’t have nice things” kind of way that I can write a lot on its own, but that someone overseas can “catch” the vision of it and live it up as if I was there. It is truly a wondrous application of the internet where joy can be spread across the world in real time.
So rather than just watching Chokaigi at home this year, I decided to get a couple friends together and watch it at the guy’s house whose most capable of doing it. This just means good internet setup, a good multimedia set up (he’s got a big TV and easy hook-up to his network), lots of power plugs, what have you. In the end we still needed a few things–more HDMI plugs would be nice, or some way to play R2 DVDs, or a better HTPC solution, but it turned out really well. You can watch the streams you all care about and talk about it, rather than let your English language comments lament in the sea of Nico memes, or make a mess of your twitter time line. Or private chat rooms wherever, which seemed to be the better venue in retrospect.
I thought Chokaigi is possibly the closest thing to an “anime con” in the sense that while it is an industry event, it dips its feet in fan culture much more so than most other industry events. It’s hard to explain or describe this gap and oddly enough we talked about it this weekend. Just what makes an AFA or an AX versus AnimeJapan? It’s hard to explain, I think, maybe because I haven’t been to all of those events, but it’s also the sort of content you promote at those venues. Maybe it’s more a SDCC or NYCC?
At any rate, through the myriad numbers of region-unlocked live streams, we were able to watch a ton of streams on Nico over the weekend and live it up real-time. This means watching that awesome anison concert on Saturday night/Sunday afternoon featuring IVE Special Unit. Takase Kazuya doing backup dancing with Maon for Ray is just amazing. In fact that whole IVE set is amazing. But what’s also amazing is to go on twitter and see the JP feeds I follow respond to the events I watch on the streams, and other non-JPers watching the same.
The number says Chokaigi 3, this year being the third Chokaigi, has about 7.6 million viewers across all its official feeds (and there were a bunch of those), which is just to say that’s only like, two thirds of total Chokaigi streams, if we go by streams not on its schedules as not official.
???????????????????????????????? pic.twitter.com/TlLb4n8Ux8
— ?????????? (@chiaking58) April 26, 2014
Anyway, just saying you can live up Chokaigi if the technology is there, the infrastructure is there. I didn’t pay the 2500 yen or whatever for Cho Party, but at that 525y entry price for premium, this is the cheapest way to brighten up a weekend. That and a VPN. And having the image of Mocho eating a Lawson generic pastry in your retina.
Update: Say hello to some Ps that we met earlier in the year:
Sakura-Con is dated kind of badly; I like to hang out at home for Easter and I was really swamped work-wise before having to jet off to Seattle. But at the same time it’s the kind of convention that I look forward to a lot, because this is my first time visiting Seattle and the place is basically like LA/AX but with all the things I dislike fixed. The con is downtown and very walkable, it’s not super crowded, lots of great eats in walking distance, and wait for it–Japanese guests!
Joke aside, I didn’t even got that excited about the Japanese guests. They’re cool and all, and I still am a Masunari Koji fan. But you know what instantly make any anime convention great? THE IDOLM@STER. So in that sense, I got to meet Toshifumi Akai, who is one of the key animators on anim@s. He didn’t get to work on the movie, we suspect, because he was neck deep in Magi Season 2 at the time, along with Masunari. Akai’s main contribution, I guess, are OP1 where he animated a few key cuts and being an animation director for a couple others. He probably also animated some key scenes here and there. If I can scan Backstage M@ster I could show you the horizontal pans he did for one of the concert scenes. Anyway, this guy is a lot of fun.
It’s always great to run into Nagahama. It’s always great to not go to his events because you’ve been to all his events at Animazement, LOL, but I was pretty busy with other things?
I wasn’t able to go to the couple Titan events because they got packed out. I went to a couple Renji Murata ones but they’re kind of mediocre, mostly because the attendees were meh at the long Q&A sessions his panels became (didn’t even sit through the whole thing). I went to a couple Aniplex panels, probably because of timing and how it worked out.
The Friday night IM@S panel was pretty fun, but it was also very, very 4chan and that kind of sucked. Just because you have a smart deck that has good jokes doesn’t mean you can give attention to people who interrupt your panel for the luls? It needed mods.
I better get to the Sunday IM@S panel in a few. Meanwhile enjoy a tweet of Adachi’s Kancolle at work pic.
Adachi was playing Kancolle w pic.twitter.com/eA9ll8v6Jf
— omo@KawaiiKon2024 (@omonomono) April 19, 2014
Kelts wrote about the “festivities” around AnimeJapan, along with the industry events that happened around the same time. Just excerpting because why not:
And in the two days following AnimeJapan, the second annual Project Anime Tokyo was held in the flashy UDX building in Akihabara. The conference is designed to bring together overseas anime convention organizers with Japanese studios for communication and collaboration. The brainchild of Marc Perez, CEO of the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, and Nobuyuki Takahashi, president of Studio Hard Deluxe, the first meeting was held by the SPJA in Los Angeles in 2012 at Anime Expo (AX), the largest anime convention in North America.
“One of the things we want to prove to the industry is that we (anime conventions) can promote them with very little investment,†says Perez. The conference is now a twice-yearly event held in LA and Tokyo alongside AX and AnimeJapan. “We also want convention organizers from around the world to share ideas and best practices. One of our goals is to eventually establish a joint charter, rules and regulations about things like bootlegging and piracy and so on.â€
You know Project Anime? The con about cons? People sat in panels about cons and industry and press and what not. I think this might be what a commenter was referring to about SPJA. And the end is still just a matter of signaling and getting people to leverage available resources. Conventions may be an underutilized resource, if indeed they are still growing (and most signs point to yes, at least in America), so then there’s going to be some way where somebody can leverage these resources with Japanese businesses in a manner in which someone (likely in Japan), with all the access and resources available, come up and execute a more unified strategy to bring it to market, to market, to promote, to build and deliver.
Why do I keep saying this LOL.
But I’m not sure if this is something we can (even naively) say is good or not, because now we’re getting to the place where you have to roll up your sleeves and make your spreadsheets and decks sparkle like an idol on stage. And there will be winners and losers in the end of all of this, just a matter of how much, and how many.
Give the full article a read, I think it plays consistent with the overall theme about where fan money is going to overseas, what Japan is (or isn’t) doing about it.
I wonder if the  Anime Anime guy would get something out of Project Anime.
PS. Studio Hard Deluxe? That sounds like an upgrade to Vertical, Inc.
PPS. Just how effective are cons at actually promoting sales of things? How about brand recognition and awareness? How about building up a fan base? It’s hard to say…