Another Record Year Thanks To Japanese Mobile Music

The J@pan Inc Newsletter: For the second year in a row, JASRAC (Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers) has reported a record amount of royalty fees collected thanks to the sale of ringtones and mobile music. "The total amount of income came to JPY 110.8 billion (US$1.03 billion), slightly more than the previous record of JPY 109.4 billion (US$1.01 billion) set for fiscal 2003."
While CD sales fell by 5.3% to JPY 26.8 billion (US$248 million), interactive distribution (including all online services, ringtones, chaku-uta, etc) rose by 12.7% to JPY 9.27 billion (US$85.8 million), more than making up for the shortfall in CD sales. Which points to the fact that the music industry, which is still crying catastrophe and blaming falling CD sales on p2p piracy, should be including ringtones in the sale of music. In the west they haven't done this, claiming global music sales fell in 2004 by excluding ringtones from the calculations.
Another interesting statistic is that master ringtones (chaku-uta and chaku-uta full) nearly quintupled in sales to JPY 0.81 billion (US$7.5 million), despite the restrictive practices of major record labels in Japan. Polyphonic ringtones (which increased by 3.9% year-on-year) accounted for 85% of the interactive music category selling JPY 7.88 billion (US$73 million). I'm pretty sure record labels collect more royalties from master ringtones than from polyphonic ringtones, and it would probably make better business sense for them not to exclude other resellers.
The newsletter links to another story about a survey by Infoseek and Mitsubishi Soken Research found that "42% of the respondents obtain music for their phones by ripping CDs then transferring the files from their PC to the phone using an SD card, while 29% said they obtain their mobile music exclusively through KDDI's chaku-uta full service. The survey also found that of the people who mainly transfer music from their PCs, nearly half reported they were spending less money on buying CDs, but more on renting CDs through Japan's many CD rental chain stores". The question is whether the increase in money spent renting CDs is larger than the decrease in money buying CDs. If it is then the practice benefits the music industry, which collects royalties from rentals.
Related stories:
--Music Labels Reject Warning From Japanese Regulator
--Record Labels Accused Of Monopolistic Practices — Again
--Napster Claims 100K Ringtone Downloads