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Live performances keep H!P, J-pop alive

Japanese teen girls in Harajuku district, Tokyo, January 2008: The main audience for Jap[anese idol music remains 70 percent female.

(No rating): Sister blog Radreview catches up with a largely ignored aspect of Japanese idol pop music -- that it is walled off, for the most part, from the outside world. That is, politics and economics within the Japanese music industry tend to suppress the true economic potential of the high-quality Japanese music product line, musical groups and music-dance troupes like the excellent Hello Project company. A history of "album sales" can be shown to be grossly misleading, as this post details. Customers of Japanese music have to go way, way out of the normal spehere of effort to access these superb songs and DVDs, which are purposely made to be incompatible with US-distributed DVD players. It's time for Sony Music to remove the handcuffs and give J-pop the global reach it deserves!

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Radreview