Unspoken agreement, unknown facts: displays at record shops

I always wonder if being secretive creates anything good and worth. In general, Japanese people tend to keep anything bad secret to keep the society work peacefully. Whatever happens behind - even if it's very ugly - if it looks great on the surface then it's fine. You don't want to know what is happening behind that. It's unspoken agreement. It's everywhere in the Japanese society. The Guardian's "Turning Japanese"(www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/11/turning-japanese-music-moguls) describes it "As is often unfortunately the case in Japanese society, people will simply find it easier to turn a blind eye" - yes, that's true.

The other day, I found on twitter that a record shop guy criticising that labels provide financial support to big record shop chains. You might not get what I am talking about. There are big record shop chains in Japan such as Tower Records, HMV and Tsutaya. Unlike record shops in the UK, there are a lot of POPs, recommendation notes and listening spots in these record shops in Japan as you can see below:

 
At the first glance, it looks really DIY made by staff members of the record shop. However, in some cases, record labels pay for obtaining display spaces like the one above. Or record chains offer "a package" of such (e.g. a set of display spaces + listening spots). Please note this isn't applied to all cases. This sort of display can often be done without any money when a record buyer of a shop really want to recommend and sell a certain record. In particular, no money seems to be involved in the process of selecting records for general listening spots as far as I'm concerned. It simply depends on what records buyers want to put on.

Back to the story of the man on twitter, some told me that the fact that record labels pay for such thing isn't necessarily known by general music fans. It's like "Why the man tweeted about that?". I would say "maybe no it isn't necessarily". However, to me there are also no reason why the people shouldn't be informed about it apart from the speculation that labels and shops want these displays look like very DIY and no "bad things(=money)" involved in.

This blog-wise, I'll try to write about and thing of what I know about the music biz in Japan as much as I could. There are too many unknown facts about it. I believe the Japanese music industry goes to nowhere unless people are well informed about how the industry works. It was the primary aim of starting the blog. I've already got a Japanese music business blog (Green Sound from Glasgow: anno69.blog16.fc2.com/) for the Japanese so this blog is for people overseas.

I'll keep you posted.