Spotify has today launched in Japan – the world’s second-biggest recorded music marketplace – on an invite-only basis.<\/p>\n
The news is significant for a number of reasons – not least Spotify’s claim to be the first music service in the region to offer both a free and ‘fully-featured’ subscription service.<\/p>\n
According to MBW analysis of RIAJ stats, Japan’s total audio recorded music market was worth 113.45bn Yen ($1.12bn) in the first six months of this year.<\/p>\n
Of that figure, 25.66bn Yen ($254m) or 22.6%, was made up of digital revenues.<\/p>\n
Subscription streaming generated just 9.34bn Yen ($92.5m), only worth 8.2% of total revenues – but was up 85% year-on-year.<\/p>\n
We’ll have to wait and see how Spotify changes that.<\/p>\n
The company has appointed Ichiro Tamaki, formerly Vice President of Amazon Devices and Kindle Content, Japan, as Spotify’s General Manager, Japan.<\/p>\n
Ichiro will be based in Tokyo and lead the day-to-day running of Spotify Japan, effective as of October 1st.<\/p>\n
Hannes Graah, currently Spotify’s Managing Director, Japan, will take on a new company role as Global Head of New Markets.<\/p>\n
Spotify’s Premium tier will launch in Japan for 980 Yen a month – which currently exchanges at $9.70<\/strong>.<\/p>\n That’s a price point which is very similar to Spotify in Western Europe and the US, indicating that the service is maximising the Average Revenue Per User is can obtain from Japan.<\/p>\n Japanese subscribers have a range of ways to pay including credit card, carrier billing, in-store and online bank payment.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re incredibly excited to launch Spotify with a uniquely Japanese music experience,\u201d says Daniel Ek, Spotify\u2019s CEO and Founder.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Spotify\u2019s revolutionary discovery and personalisation features that fit your every mood, we aim to help people enjoy more music and connect more artists with fans than ever before.\u201d<\/p>\n Following the Japan launch, Spotify will be available in 60 markets worldwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Subscription streaming currently only makes up 8% of Japan’s market<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":26547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[108],"class_list":["post-26546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-spotify"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}