They Be Takin’ Ma Animes – The End of R1 Distribution Industry?
Author: NovaJinx
Hey look folks, Nova’s gonna try being smarter than he really is and write up a post about some serious anime distribution business. You can blame the Author for this one, as a recent post of his sparked my interest in the subject once again.
Basically Robert, the guy many of us know from Robert’s Anime Corner Store, seemed to have lost his nerve a bit and lashed at the current trend in the anime distribution market. Let me just slap the quote right here for starters:
R1 studios are not going to be able to build a future on paid downloads or advertising revenue shares. That strategy caters mostly to the folks who are currently stealing Anime, and is DOA. From my point of view, I only care about the concerns of paying Anime fans. Torrent downloaders and bootleggers have no stake, and therefore no voice, in the Anime industry and their concerns should go entirely ignored by the industry except to the point of what might entice them to become paying customers again.
While we all can surely sympathize with Robert’s feelings on the matter, it’s easy to see quite a few flaws here. Basically this is just a huge pile of ad hominem argumentation (ooh, me use smart words), although it may not be that obvious at the first glance. I mean, person A downloads his anime as fansub releases, thus watching them free of charge and possibly storing them for rewatches. Person B on the other hand, diligently waits for the said anime to be licensed and then buys the DVD releases when they appear in his area of distribution. Why would industry care about person A then right? Not like he’s gonna pay for anything he can get for free.
I’m sure you all know the answer: Because person A exists in vast numbers, while the population of B’s is dwindling. So the industry can choose to either cater an audience that is slowly but surely disappearing or try to find a way to get in touch with the one that is far bigger and growing. It doesn’t take a business major to know which is the smarter move in the long run. I’m sure Robert is a smart fellow too and I respect his business in the R1 distribution zone – made a few good DVD deals at RACS myself while I was in the US. Unfortunately he’s sitting in the boat that has been abandoned by the distribution industry above him. For him it’s easy to put the blame on the type A consumers and the industry for pursuing them in a way that doesn’t involve his services. From where he’s standing, it seems only natural to form an argument that since person A downloads anime for free, person A does not deserve to be considered by the industry as a prospective customer.
How about person A’s own circumstances? Aren’t they all bad people who will never agree to honestly pay for anything they can get for free? I bet they also steal their food, cars, jobs and loved ones as well! Nasty people, full of nothing but malice and ignorance! I’m sure there are a lot of people like that. They will watch fansubs and never consider actually paying for the anime they consume. However, in many cases people like this are kids and teenagers who are yet too immature to understand that someone’s always gonna have to pay for something and mostly lack the means of buying their entertainment anyway. I hate to use this clichéd argument but it’s not like they’d buy the stuff anyway. I’d also like to nitpick about Robert’s use of the word stealing but you’ve all heard that stuff in every for-/anti-piracy argument ever so let’s leave it at that. I believe that within demography of mature fansub watchers there is strong willingness to pay for the product as long as it’s competitive. Current traditional DVD-releases cannot compete with fansubs. We want to watch anime within a day or two from its broadcast in Japan, decently subbed and delivered directly onto our monitors or hard drives. Fansub releases can meet these demands – after all, digitally distributed fansubs are the ones that defined them. However that doesn’t mean that they could not be matched by commercial products.
It’s not like I don’t buy DVDs. I do, every now and then. But I belong in the demographic Americans conveniently ignore when debating for the preservation of their distribution industry – a European. Americans just love to pretend to be speaking for the entire Western anime fandom. Take a look around for a change – you may notice us standing at a distance, leering at you with our fists clenched in our pockets, uttering “Just speak for yourselves, you pretentious little fucks“. So your beloved R1 distribution industry is dying due to fansubs? Welcome to the fucking club. At least you actually had anime distribution to begin with. Out here in the jungle of cultures and languages DVD distributors either ignore anime as likely unprofitable or treat it as some half-assed hobby.
Now that the industry has taken a turn towards delivering their product digitally to all corners of the globe, it’s finally the time for us be treated as a market. Now if I want to legally watch the latest anime releases, I don’t have to look around a dozen online stores all operating from the US for the best deals, pay 40 dollars just for the shipping, wait two weeks for the delivery to crawl across the globe, risk having to pay anything up to 150% custom charge (I paid 70 USD for my Haruhi box set and then 70 euros customs charge and forwarding) and then curse because Finland is in R2, so I can’t even watch the DVDs without some extra measures done on the hardware. So with all due respect to Robert and his countrymen, when you wail over the death of R1 and imply that the ridiculously expensive, risky and slow method I just described should be the only correct one, I cannot feel much sympathy for your cause. I am an European, this change only serves my needs and saves me tons of money if I want to be a nice, law-abiding citizen. Thus I am not your ally, you hypocrite cockbites. About time you realized that and stopped thinking you speak for everyone.
Ahem, enough with the obligatory RAGE. I’ve already heard of Japanese industry actually intending to cut loose the dead weight of R1 distribution despite the Western industry’s frantic efforts to redefine its market and services. It caught my eye at AFA ‘09 that the Japanese Summer Wars DVD release apparently contains English subtitles – first signs of the Japanese intention to abandon the R1 industry? This trend sure works for me, since Finland is in R2 region just like Japan. Being able to make use of the Japanese DVD releases would make things quite a bit convenient for me and the rest of us R2 consumers – which means pretty much the entire Europe.
Bottom line here? You’re on your own here Americans. Industry shifting towards digital delivery and the Japanese move to entirely abandon the American distributors work for our benefit. It’s lamentable that it will make times hard for Robert and others doing business at the very end of the distribution line in R1 but I firmly believe that this change will work better for all of us. Or the R1 industry could make the whole thing a legal matter – in which case I advise them to ask for PROTIPs from ODEX, I’m sure it worked just great for them!
P.S. Don’t worry, Americana, I still love you ;3
7 Comments to They Be Takin’ Ma Animes – The End of R1 Distribution Industry?
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It still amuses me, that people grasp at straws of physical media, when its been clear for years now, that digital media cannot be regulated on that level. If it can be digitized – it will spread, doesnt matter what you do, as long as internet itself exist.
We need new ways of compensation, not enforcing old ones.
The only downside to that is that in Japan DVDs are priced five times the Western norm.
But concerning the debate itself… We all know that in the Japanese anime business 10 000 sold units means the title’s a hit, so it’s not like even there that many people buy anime. In the end it’s all mainly a paid advertisement for the original work (TV slots cost money in Japan), or the money’s coming back from the licensed goods. Kadokawa even let Yasuhiro Takemoto pull the Endless Eight stunt without knowing if it would hurt the sales or not – the sales didn’t matter.
In any case it’s not like the money has ever been in the physical media in the first place. Or in the North American market, sans for the shows that are designed for American tastes and are therefore shitty.
Hua Hua Hua..
i love the pic of south america!!..i
@Tsubasa:
In the case of the Japanese market, there is indeed a fair bit of money that comes back from the DVDs/BDs when a show is at least marginally successful. (5,000 copies sold x 6 volumes x 5,000 yen each = enough to pay for the average one-cour anime’s production, at least. Note that the “10,000″ figure is per volume, and most anime are 6 volumes+ in Japan.) But the concept with most late night shows is certainly the so-called “media-mix”, where you have books, and CDs, and magazines, and figures, and character goods, and videogames, *and* DVDs/BDs — an airing anime simply raises the profile of the franchise in general, and all the players are ready in line with goods of all sorts to entice the fans. Of course the problem with the North American market is that you have very little of that merchandising, not to mention the DVDs there are so much cheaper than the Japanese releases. So even if you sell 10,000 copies of a show, at $40 for the single boxset it’s maybe 1/4 the return. It’s a nice little bonus, but it doesn’t pay for the show even if you sell twice as many copies as in Japan. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can completely throw away all of that revenue entirely. Put those two stats together and you’re still talking about nearly $2 million in total retail sales. What’s going to fill the gap?
Not a single mention of Region Restrictions? If we Europeans want to spend money on digitaly distributed anime, they better stop making it impossible for us to give them our money
…first signs of the Japanese intention to abandon the R1 industry?
I support this move! R2 For Life (I’m not even in R2, but I like the notion… R1 distribution is just silly, I’ve never been impressed).
[...] entry on regional dvd licensing and distribution. Interesting comments as well, though there was one with a massive generalization, but [...]