The latest in music media publishing, Music media watch brings to you the cutting edge of what's going on in the music publishing industry in Japan.

A welcome return of J@pan Inc's Music Media Watch newsletter, just in time to make provide us with a good round oup of the year's music media highlights. Read Now

J@pan Inc Magazine Presents:
Music Media Watch.
The writer is taking a short break and will return in December.

Music Media Watch looks back at market trends concerning polyphonic ringtones and takes a look ahead at where the ringtone innovators are moving to next. Includes a round up of music media news from Japan. Read Now

Music Media Watch brings you cutting edge commentary on Japan's music technology news. This edition focuses on the the iPhone and a potential tie-up with Softbank.

Commentary on Japan's music technology news with a feature focus on JASRAC, Japan's main copyright collection organization legal wrangles in the digital music media industry

As we reported a few months ago in MMW #108, the recent trend for Japanese mobile content providers has been to set up new services off the main menu 'decks' of the wireless carriers. These off-portal sites are not subject to any approval process, restrictions or oversight by the carriers, but the content provider must generate his own traffic and handle his own billing. So far there have been... Read Now

On October 3 of last year, Napster Japan launched the first online music subscription service in Japan with an 'all-you-can-eat' model - allowing subscribers to download and play as much music as they like for a flat monthly fee. Accompanied by a massive marketing campaign featuring oversized bar-code poster ads, the Napster Japan launch attracted a great deal of...

Having been involved for the past five years in bringing Japanese mobile music services to overseas markets, I've developed a deep interest in the differences between mobile content (and music in particular) between Japan and other countries. In fact, the very first issue of this newsletter...

Ever since the first ringtone sites began appearing on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode menu back in 1999, most mobile music content providers in Japan have pushed to have their services appear on the 'main menu' of the wireless carriers. This approach has become known as the 'official service' model, and works something like this...