The Music Awards Japan is a new music award established in 2025 with the aim of becoming the 'Grammy Awards of Asia'.
The establishment of this award was triggered by dissatisfaction with the existing music rankings and music awards in Japan.
Since the late 1980s in Japan, Oricon has been used as the standard for music rankings.Oricon has conducted physical sales surveys for many years, and after the 1990s when CDs began to sell explosively, it established its position firmly.
However, as we entered the 21st century and music downloads began to become mainstream, in Japan, the single CD priced at 1,200 yen was at the center of the business model, leading to the 250 yen download sales being considered "low profit margin" and treated as inferior to CD sales, resulting in Oricon not creating rankings for them.
As a result, the Oricon, which continued to create rankings solely based on CD sales, gradually became unable to showcase hit songs, leading to overlooking hits that were only defined by download sales.
Furthermore, the interests aligned with the Johnny's Entertainment agency, which at the time was only selling CDs without any music distribution, and they even revised the method of counting CD sales to base it on their sales approach, intentionally reducing the sales figures of others. As a result, Oricon lost its credibility in terms of numbers.
Due to this situation, the Japanese music industry was reluctant to expand overseas, as it was able to make a sufficient profit from domestic sales alone.
They were also reluctant to distribute music domestically, and when it came to music videos, they even tried to restrict the release of official videos by law in order to prevent copying.
It was not until the 2020s that music programs on television started featuring full performances of songs, and it can be said that these were all strategies to encourage people to buy CDs.
Due to these reasons, the reality is that Japanese music culture is more than 10 years behind other countries.
Currently, Billboard Japan has become the mainstream music ranking in Japan. However, as streaming has become the center of the charts in recent years, the solidification of top tracks has become serious, resulting in charts that show little variation.
The reason is that many streaming users are listening to the ranking playlists, and whether a song is included or not significantly affects the number of plays.
As a result, the situation continues where songs from several years ago remain in the annual rankings without issue, and similar to the original Billboard, there are calls for the establishment of a recurrent rule.
In the past, there were many music awards in Japan, but now the only one broadcast on terrestrial television is the Japan Record Award.
However, after the 1990s, the grand prize-winning songs were leaked in advance, and further in 2014, there were reports of allegations of a purchase for 100 million yen, which led to a severe loss of trust.
As we entered the 2020s, songs released solely through music distribution began to be nominated, and the award-winning tracks have started to gain some acceptance, gradually regaining trust. However, it seems that it will take time to recover what was lost.
In response to such dissatisfaction, the Music Awards Japan was established to further promote Japanese and Asian music to the world.
Will it really go according to the organizers' plans?
