The Silent Room

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Small Talk:
OMG! OMG! OMG! In less than 12 hours, Blizzard is going to announce it’s newest game release! I am dead serious in my prediction that it’ll be Starcraft 2. It better damn well be, after what they did to Starcraft: Ghost XD *cross fingers and dances like a rabid fanboy*

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Simon gave me a link that hinted to a very disappointing piece of news. So I went ahead and Googled for more information. One particular blog that I found has made several distinctive remarks about the whole issue. There is an anime licensing company in Singapore now, and from the looks of it, there’s also a compiled list of anime titles that are already licensed there.

I remember how many governments were very fired up against Kazaa and MP3 music downloads. Judging from what we see today, apparently nothing much has changed. When people can’t use Kazaa, they use Limewire. When Limewire began to suck, they move to something else [which I won't mention]. If not, they move to one of the many Bittorrent clients available. With the many ways of covering your tracks and masking yourself, people have continued to download media off the net, and nobody could do anything about it.

Of course, Mr. Yankovic knows exactly how things are with the MP3 drama these days.

I can’t find the link, but according to the results of an online survey I read a couple of years ago, a majority of p2p users still prefer to go out and actually buy the original music CDs instead of sticking to MP3’s alone. The reason is quite simple, people who really appreciate the music will appreciate the novelty of an original item, and will enjoy to pure quality of uncompressed audio. Okay, don’t start with me about unnoticeable quality loss in the latest audio compression formats, that’s not the main idea here.

I think the same can be said about anime.

I’m not saying that we should implement what Singapore is doing to the their anime community, here in Malaysia. It won’t provide one single bit of help to the anime community, and the development of anime as a whole. You see, a big contributor to the success of anime outside Japan is the community of dedicated fansub teams who work without expecting anything in return – except maybe a little bit of credit, and some change to maintain their servers.

Shutting off fansubs in a certain region will NOT help anime sales in ANY way at all. Thanks to the distribution of fansubbed anime, many titles have garnered worldwide popularity that was beyond anything anyone could have ever imagined ten years ago. Anime has been around for a long time, but with the arrival of Bittorrent and the latest video compression technology, fansub groups have taken anime to a whole new level.

In fact, fansubbers are actually doing free advertising to the said anime titles. By exposing the anime to the global public, it allows the fans evaluate the show before deciding on the purchase. This is exactly what has been happening with MP3’s for the past couple of years. MP3 downloads have been going on endlessly, but when a musician is made famous by the quality of their works, [or through MP3 distribution, hahaha] many of them still manage to hit gold and platinum sales. That’s concrete evidence right there.

I think a big problem here is that they [the licensing companies] are targeting the wrong market audience. Producing entertainment media costs money, it’s only natural that they want to make a profit in return, right? Hence, the CDs and DVDs can cost quite a bit. Unfortunately, these media are actually enjoyed more by those who don’t really have the money to afford them.

High school and college students [who mostly have no steady income] make up a majority of serious anime [and music] lovers. Go on, make the comparison yourself, you’ll know that I’m right about this shit. What sucks is that these guys don’t even have that much money to begin with – I know of friends who went for one-meal-per-day regimes for months just to get themselves an MP3 player – yet these big, corporate entities that own the intellectual properties [IPs], want to clamp down on them, take legal action, threatening them with lawsuits and stuff.

You think threatening penniless people will convince them to buy YOUR expensive stuff? That’s as logical as telling a penguin to fly.

Oh, so now you’re telling me about how licensed anime is already available here in Malaysia? Let’s see, a box set DVD of anime here costs, what, at least RM 80? Oh yeah, that’s really cheap. It’s so cheap, it’s well worth NOT downloading them. You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Then again, it’s not like I don’t understand why they can get so expensive. For one thing, the anime isn’t licensed here. Most likely, it’s licensed in the US, and that translates to currency rates, on top of that there’s also the additional importing costs. So how do we solve this problem? Have an anime licensing company here in Malaysia?

To tell you the truth, that itself isn’t really a bad idea. HOWEVER, the said licenser must be supportive of the community. Their aim must be, first and foremost, to facilitate the distribution of legal copies of anime, and to spread the love. Let there be continuity in the distribution of fansubbed anime. Hey, it’s free promotion for your bloody titles! Make use of that situation, dammit!

Sure, fansubbed anime may just be as illegal as ripped mp3, but take advantage of it. Exploit the negatives and make something out of it. Take notice what edges that the fansubbing community can indirectly give you:

• You get to know what show is hot, and what’s not.
  [You can plan on what titles you want to license.]
• You get to know what rating the show should deserve, as well as its target audience.
  [You can specifically target your sales demographic with that knowledge.]
• You get to know what the fans like, or don’t like about a certain show.
  [With that information you can effectively plan your promotional work flow to suit each title.]

Fansubs deal directly with the community of anime lovers. It’s a freaking goldmine of information that you can use to benefit your sales. Sponsor anime events, spread awareness, help the community. Get the anime lovers to love you, and in turn they will love your merchandise.

Unfortunately, many distributing companies fail to realize this – especially in the US – and they couldn’t care less. Their main priority is to satisfy their bottomless greed. Business comes first, they say. To them, anime is nothing but goods. Just like how fishes are to fishmongers at the wet market.

If licensed anime is distributed at reasonable prices, affordable by the people who seriously love anime, and those who would go out of their way to purchase an original copy, I say why not? The main point is to not stop the efforts of spreading anime awareness by ruling the downloads of fansubbed anime as illegal. Let it be, and take advantage of the possibilities they have to offer.

Many anime lovers understand well enough that producing anime costs money, and I believe many of them want to give back to the scene. But we want to give back to the people who actually MAKE those anime, not the greedy middlemen who just want to rake in profits from something that’s not theirs.