HJ in the Nikkei Shinbun

HearJapan was recently featured in the top Japanese financial newspaper, The Nikkei Shinbun. The March 25th morning edition featured HearJapan on a quarter of their news page. The Nikkei Shinbun is the equivalent of The Wall Street Journal in the USA or The Financial Times in the UK. Here is a rough translation of the article :

Nathan Reaven, an American who graduated from the Inter-University Center administered by Stanford University located in Minato Mirai (Yokohama) incorporated an export service focusing around Japanese popular music. Starting in February, he opened up a Japanese-only download service called HearJapan without the help of a similar service to use as an example.

“Japan has the largest music market outside of America. This represents the sheer number of musicians that are performing great music, but there is no way for this music to reach fans living abroad. The present situation is nothing but a closed country (sakoku; Japan before the Meiji Period). With that in mind, I decided to create a site. Without resorting to illegal file downloads, it is relatively expensive to buy Japanese music and very cumbersome. One of this sites focuses is on the genre that has recently become popular in America, post rock. Through the site, they introduce musicians to the rest of the world, and enable anyone from any part of the world to easily download their music.

Websites that feature Japanese Music in English are getting unprecedented unique users, which signifies that there is a strong demand for Japanese music. After the service launched over a month ago, the sales were in a few hundred songs a day and has recently gotten to be around 500 per day.

Profiles and live information regarding the musicians are also published in English. With lots of content, the site averages 20,000 hits per day. The number of servers will also increase dramatically this spring to accompany the strong demand.

What originally troubled Mr. Reaven was where to locate the servers. America is the cheapest place to locate servers, and has the fastest access time for global users. However, by putting them in Japan, HearJapan would be able to pay copyright payments to the artist and go through agencies such as JASRAC. This makes it easy for HearJapan to attract new musicians. The server racks are located in Tokyo.

This was a plus for the musicians when negotiating with HearJapan. The price of each song is on average 150 yen, but each musician can decide the rate that they want to sell their music. If the price is too cheap, then the “reverse import” problem appears where the Japanese fans buy the music from HearJapan for rock bottom prices.

HearJapan started off with around 20 artists and 200 songs and now features 60 artists with 2000 songs. Already they have signed contracts with over 100 artists.

The system is developed by an Indian corporation, 360DI. Development and maintenance creates assurance of an always functioning site. The cost was also a deciding factor. “Compared to Japanese and American software developers, the price was about one tenth in India,” according to Nathan.

During his high school years, he spent one year in Aomori prefecture as a foreign exchange student. In 2002 he promoted the popular “PUFFY” Jpop duo. He majored in Japanese during his University and at the IUC center he focuesed on International Copyright issues. With a plentiful site, he is enthusiastic about the site. “I hope to become the version of Mathew Perry opening up Japan with his black ships for this century,” said Nathan.