Originally Posted by Delirium-Zer0
Any company in their right mind is going to do what they can to get as much money as possible. That money goes to the artists, the people running the company, studio time, graphic designers, lawyers, accountants, rent on office space, TONS of unseen people making the business work. Whatever you have to do as a company to make sure everyone gets paid, do it.
I'd MUCH rather they release best-of after best-of than force artists to do shows all day every day and record 2-3 albums a year, that's for sure. The more money they can make without Ayu doing any actual work, the better for everyone involved.
As for the speed of new material being released... I see you're from the UK, how long have you been following Asian pop? It startled me quite a bit to see how fast-paced music careers are there compared to the west. Here, it's an album every 3-4 years and that's about average. And we're USED to that, is the difference. But in Japan, if you don't have an album each year, if you don't have a single or SOME new song a few times a year, that's strange and unexpected and fans wonder where you've been. the brilliant green took a hiatus for 3 years from 2002-2005 and people were REALLY excited when they came back. The pace is just different there.
Asian labels certainly aren't slave drivers. The approach is very different. In the west, an artist will write or even record up to 35 songs for one album, leaving 20+ songs completely unheard by the audience. That's REALLY unusual in Japan. When Ayu writes 35 songs, we hear most of them. It's just spread out over 3 years so we get a more constant feed of new material. In either case, it's three years worth of work in the West or in Japan, but in Japan, they all get released, and they get released gradually.
In the west, rock music and even pop music is considered more of an "art," where in Asia it's considered more "work." Their job is to entertain their audience and get paid for it. Here it's considered rather disrespectful to look at it that way. So in the west, the producers & writers hand-pick which songs are the highest quality, the most worth it for the audience to hear. In the east, every song gets finished to perfection, completed, and released. It's roughly the same amount of work on both sides of the world, but labels in Japan are, in my opinion, smarter for releasing more records, especially since their market share is much smaller. Japan spends more money per-capita on music each year than ANY other country. America gets its financial advantage by marketing to the whole world, though, so artists in the west for the most part don't need to release as many records to make the same amount of money. Japanese artists have a very hard time marketing outside of Asia, so they just make more material.
Part of their selling technique is, unfortunately, packaging the DVDs of Ayu's videos with her albums (as they do with most artists). People wouldn't pay extra for the CD+DVD version if the DVD product was available in its entirety on YouTube. What they put on YT is enough to sample a song or video to see if you'd be willing to pay for it (they put a big chunk of the videos on there, it's irritating that it's not the whole thing but it makes sense). I'd rather own a high-quality DVD of those videos than depend on YouTube for watching them, though, so if I have to pick one or the other, I'm fine with how they're doing things.
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