Billboard’s Billboard Global Power Players list recognizes the leaders that are driving the success of the music business in countries outside the United States. Avex Inc.’s CEO, Katsumi Kuroiwa, was chosen again from the music industry leaders of the world for inclusion in the list. Billboard JAPAN interviewed Kuroiwa upon his selection and talked to him about signing Bruno Mars, the prospects of the company’s global music catalog acquisition project, and the challenges involved in overseas expansion.
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The announcement of the global music publishing partnership between the Avex Music Group (AMGL) and Bruno Mars made a huge splash. Could you talk a bit about what AMGL does?
Katsumi Kuroiwa: Broadly speaking, AMGL’s business consists of label business and music publishing. We knew that to make an impact on the American market, first and foremost, we had to make unique creative content. We started out through the song and publishing business, acquiring rights and building a solid system with a strong local presence.
Going forward, AMGL is aiming to serve as a bridge that connects Japanese and other Asian artists with the rest of the world. AMGL’s network is home to many excellent songwriters who have created music for diverse artists, from top class global entertainers like Justin Bieber and Drake to groups on the frontlines of K-pop, like ILLIT or LE SSERAFIM.What’s important is that top creators like these have a hub where they can come together and pool their creative output. It’s because of that environment that our artists, like BE:FIRST, ONE OR EIGHT, or XG, can constantly put out world-class music and create truly new music.
It’s not easy for Japanese artists to strike out into overseas markets on their own. That’s why we have local music production sites like the Avex House and Avex Studios. This unique environment is what has given us the foothold that enables us to keep creating collaborative spaces like full-fledged song camps, and to directly bring together the world’s top creators and talent from Japan. If this approach functions successfully, then artists—not just our own, but from other labels, as well—will be able to spread their wings overseas. We’ll be using this unique network, focused on local sites, to further expand our range of activities.
So by signing local creators and building your catalog, you’ll also expand the potential of Japanese artists?
Kuroiwa: Brandon and Bruno Mars’ manager is a close family friend of mine, and sometime last September we had a meal together in Los Angeles. Bruno loves Japan and Korea. He’s a global superstar, and he’s always overflowing with ambition to take on new challenges and try new things. He’s now signed a global contract with us to manage music publishing for him, and I have high hopes for the specific directions he’s going to be taking. We’d like to create a collaboration with him like “APT.” We think it would be interesting to combine him with unique Japanese culture, and to go global with it. There will be even more opportunities for a direct global market approach in the future, and I hope to use this music publishing management partnership to take on those challenges.
Also, in this year’s Grammys, AMGL writer Kamal Wilson won the Best R&B Song award for Kehlani’s “Folded.”
Kuroiwa: This is the first time one of our signed artists has won a Grammy. I think having a writer like this, someone who has taken the world’s top honors, on our team will have an immeasurable impact on our future business.
Kamal, an AMGL writer, provided the music and built a powerful relationship of trust with the artist, Kehlani. During the course of their day-to-day music production, an idea came up, spontaneously and rather quickly, of using AMGL’s network for a collaboration between Kehlani and an Avex artist. It’s not like a collab was created in the office, with a businesslike approach. Instead, the trust between different creators and the connections of our internal network have produced a system that naturally generates these kinds of opportunities and does so on a global scale. By securing the rights to superb artists and backing their activities, we’re creating a wonderful system that lifts artists up to the global stage.
You’ve announced a global music catalog acquisition project with a total scale of around 100 million dollars. Is Avex going to be focusing its efforts on that kind of catalog acquisition going forward?
Kuroiwa: The catalog business model is a robust one, and its value has been proven in the streaming age. The whole market is keeping a close eye on it, because great songs from the past are extraordinarily valuable assets that generate stable revenue.
But what I need to emphasize is that buying and selling catalogs isn’t our ultimate goal. Catalog acquisition and sales are just a method of achieving our goals.
What we really want to do is to use the Brandon’s exceptional judgment and network, and that of his team, to their fullest, acquiring catalogs, maximizing their value, and using them to produce new creative content and new music.
It’s not just about owning rights, but breathing new life into music through unique initiatives involving Brandon and through unprecedented collaborations. That forward-looking, creative approach is our main objective.
The fact that we were able to create this 100 million dollar framework, and lay out this vision, is thanks to the powerful trust the U.S. market has shown us, and the fact that this resonates so much with it.
At last year’s Coachella, XG became the first Japanese artist ever to headline the Sahara Stage, which generated a lot of buzz. This year, they’ll be doing a world tour. What challenges do you think the future holds when it comes to exporting Japanese artists like XG?
Kuroiwa: The Japanese government has positioned the content industry as one of Japan’s core industries, and aims to increase exports to 20 trillion yen by 2033. I think that’s a great step forward. Until now, Japanese entertainment has been making its overseas inroads as separate, isolated industries, like games, anime, movies, and music. The government has brought them all together as a single “content industry” and shown that Japan needs to develop its global earning power. I am really looking forward to the Japanese government swinging into full gear to achieve this goal. But to really export Japanese artists, I think the biggest challenge will be developing a powerful, national-level framework that also looks to the tremendous ripple effects that can be generated through entertainment.
The way things stand now, private sector companies take all the risk in global expansion efforts, like putting on shows overseas. Recently, you had the cancellation of an Ayumi Hamasaki concert in China. All the time and effort that had been invested in it was wiped out. When a concert is suddenly cancelled due to local circumstances or sudden unforeseen events, private companies take all of the losses. I think this is an area where there’s room for improvement. I’m not talking about compensation for losses by any single company, but taking into consideration the massive additional benefits entertainment has for the entire country. For example, when we brought Taylor Swift to Japan, around 40 to 50% of the tickets were bought by overseas fans. They flew here on planes, stayed in hotels, and went sightseeing, spending their money in Japan. The economic impact was in the tens or hundreds of billions of yen, and the government also brought in a lot of tax revenue.
If you look overseas, you can see success cases in which governments have strategically provided backup through the equivalent of billions of yen in public support and infrastructure. And through that, they’ve brought in massive amounts of tax revenue and economic benefits that far surpass this investment, benefiting the whole country. I think it’s vital that Japan invests, not so that private companies can profit, but to bring in foreign currency and stimulate the entire nation’s economy, with the private sector and the national government working together. I think the government needs to apply that kind of perspective, making this a consistent part of our nation’s economy.
—This interview by Naoko Takashima first appeared on Billboard Japan