As explained on The Verge[0], the internet has been essential to the rise of K-pop, and the K-pop industry is not nearly as strict about piracy as the American music industry is.
Though I'm not really riding on the South Korean wave, I have a huge amount of respect for Korea's music labels (at least when it comes to how they release their content).
If one takes a look at YouTube channels for the South Korean labels, the videos the provide are almost always high quality -- both in terms of actual video quality and content that they release (e.g. LOEN[1] and SMTOWN[2]).
On the other side of the sea, you have Japan. From the US side, it seems that Japanese labels haven't been too generous with releasing their content overseas. Universal Music Japan has been the only big label (IMO) that has been great with releasing content. The other end of the spectrum, you have Sony Music...and they've been pretty quick to bring down videos as well.
> On the other side of the sea, you have Japan. From the US side, it seems that Japanese labels haven't been too generous with releasing their content overseas.
As explained in this article by The Verge[0], the Japanese are still very much tethered to physical media. They regularly rent/buy CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs, for reasons discussed in the article, which has kept profits high in the Japanese entertainment industry, compared to the West. Physical album sales have actually risen 11% in Japan in 2012, compared to 2011[1].
This, combined with the Japanese market's size and the almost complete absence of piracy there, has obviated the need for Japanese artists to embrace the internet or market their products abroad. Korea, on the other hand, has a much smaller population, and one for which piracy is a way of life. Korean artists are thus forced to market abroad, and in fact get 80% of their profits from Japan[1].
Among domestic Japanese groups, on the other hand, there has also been a reliance on various gimmicks to boost physical single and album sales. For example, AKB48, a girl pop group with dozens of members (originally 48 of them), holds yearly elections (senbatsu) to determine the order in which the members are ranked. You get one voting code for each physical copy of a particular single/album that you buy. There are crazy fans that will literally buy thousands of copies of a single CD in order to repeatedly vote for their favorite member, so that member wins[2,3].
Yeah, one of the things that Akimoto Yasushi (the genius behind AKB48) did was create an idol group with girls that have a more down-to-earth and "accessible" image. They perform daily at a theater in Akihabara (the nerd district in Tokyo), and after the performance you get to meet the girls. And they supposedly have had no plastic surgery, which is supposed to contribute to their accessible image in a country where plastic surgery is quite popular in the entertainment industry (though many have said this is a lie and called them 整形B48/Seikei-B48, a pun on their name using the word for plastic surgery).
Artists and Media companies know that music copyright is impossible to enforce, and they do not build their business around selling of music content. In China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, no one buys CDs, but people spend a ton on consumer goods that are schilled by these artists, and also a ton on concerts to watch them perform live. US record labels need to wake up and figure out how to build real businesses around artists not tied to selling music.
What are you talking about? This might be true for the other countries, but it is most definitely not true for Japan, as I explained in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4903236
0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3516562/k-pop-invades-ame...