Kazumasa Izawa of JASRAC on Meeting the New Challenges of Japanese Music Worldwide: Billboard Global Power Players Interview

Billboard‘s Global Power Players list recognizes the leaders that are driving the success of the music business in countries outside the United States. Kazumasa Izawa, President of JASRAC, was chosen from the music industry leaders of the world for inclusion in the list for the first time. Billboard JAPAN interviewed Izawa in recognition of his selection for the list. We talked to him about the new issues that have arisen as Japanese music spreads worldwide and about JASRAC’s unique ability to deal with these problems.

You were appointed president of JASRAC in 2022, and since then you’ve been focusing on enhancing communications between rights owners and users, and on digitalization. What have these four years been like?

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Kazumasa Izawa: Our business consists of receiving usage applications from those wishing to use music, collecting copyright royalties as remuneration, and distributing those royalties to creators. For the music industry to grow sustainably, we must consistently distribute those copyright royalties to creators without fail, never allowing the payments to stop. Since the 1980s, when our operations were already digitalized to some extent, our main focus was robustness, ensuring that there were never any interruptions to our operations or our systems. When you submit a paper form work registration for a piece of music, it always has to be stamped with a registered seal. That’s because under no circumstances could we allow someone to impersonate a rights owner and take their remuneration. Currently, most registrations are conducted online, and here, too, we’ve taken every possible precaution to ensure there are no problems.

The way people listen to music has also changed, right?

Right. Legal changes in 2000 opened up the copyright management business sector to private operators, and after that, the way people listened to music shifted from CD to digital. So our business environment underwent a massive transformation. I came to feel that robustness alone wouldn’t be enough, going forward. We needed to have robust systems, but we also needed the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Since being appointed president, I’ve been working on improving our resilience.

The Medium-term Management Plan you announced the other day talks about expanding the amount of payments you receive from overseas.

Five years ago, our overseas revenue was around 1.1 billion yen. By 2025, that had risen 2.6-fold to around 2.9 billion yen. But I still don’t think that’s enough. Industries like television, radio, or records became widespread at quite different speeds in different countries, depending on the country’s state of development or its legal framework. But new Internet-based services spread worldwide at more or less the same speed. Music and video streaming services have gained widespread use over the past few years, and I feel like that presents huge opportunities to rights management organizations in different countries. But the data associated with the music is in different languages, so matching up the data presents new challenges. The question is how to match up music that is managed using different languages, like Japanese, Korean, or Thai, and using different IDs.

That’s why in 2023 JASRAC announced GDSDX, a platform for sharing and exchanging content information and song information for major digital streaming services, right?

Right. Global DSPs helped us out with that. We were able to use the content management codes of DSPs who were doing business globally, like Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, to match up music across different languages. When GDSDX started in 2023, it just covered the Philippines, South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Japan, but now it’s expanded to 18 countries and regions. Recently, France joined as well. France is where the world’s first music copyright management organization was established, in 1851, so I think France joining the GDSDX is evidence of how highly it has been evaluated. No matter how good the music one puts out, or how many people listen to it, remuneration isn’t possible without first identifying the work. In modern society, where content can be released worldwide, data matching is extremely important. It has become one of the resources that drives business.

Now that anyone can stream music, they say that, worldwide, over 100,000 songs are released every day.

Back when people listened to CDs, the production capacity of CD manufacturing plants determined the maximum number of new songs that could be put out. From 2000 onward, distribution and invoice calculations became digitalized, but things like CD catalogs were still written out on paper using a ball point pen, with carbon paper copies being submitted. Even with that approach, people could still finish the work on time. Nowadays, though, the challenge is to quickly and accurately collect that information and to share that information efficiently with rights management organizations.

First, we wanted all music creators, whether professional or amateur, to be actively interested in the copyrights of their own works and we wanted to make it easy for them to protect and manage those copyrights online. That’s why we released the KENDRIX music information management system. We also operate various events and media channels aimed at providing creators with a greater understanding of copyright. The music industry changed rapidly between the time when Edison invented the phonograph and the year 2000, but since the rise of global DSPs, new Internet-based technologies have been creating and evolving businesses at an even more stunning rate.

And then you’ve got generative AI.

That’s right. We’ve seen the birth of AI, which is a technology but also has the potential to become a contributor to the music business in its own right. We’re not out to reject new technologies, but given this situation, one of the common challenges being faced by those involved in music copyright and the music industry is how to heighten the value of copyrighted music and how creators will grow in this new environment. And I hope that all creators become members of collective management organizations (CMOs), whether that’s JASRAC or another organization. That helps protect their copyrights worldwide and helps ensure they get paid for the use of their music.

—This interview by Naoko Takashima first appeared on Billboard Japan

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