Japanese Pop – The growth of the Japanese music…

By Roma Patel

The Japanese music industry is not only one of the biggest music markets in the world, but a cultural phenomenon too which has resonated with people within and outside of the borders of Japan, especially since the 2000s which saw a stark rise in the popularity of Asian music worldwide.

Jpop, or Japanese pop, is a musical genre which first started to emerge around the 1950s. Following World War II, American influences, particularly rock and roll, impacted the pop culture scene in Japan, allowing it to begin taking its own shape. The 80s and 90s saw a significant turning point for Japanese pop, in which artists such as Seiko Matsuda and Hikaru Utada quickly became household names. Jpop is now a genre crowded with pop groups, boy bands and girl groups in which there are “idols”, and although the genre is labelled as “pop”, this does not mean it is limited to a single genre of music.

Japanese pop is far from a monolith, it is a diverse landscape in which groups can explore genres such as jazz, rock and electronic music, and the popularity of the music has been accelerated by platforms such as Twitter and TikTok, in which the music can now be spread by listeners, allowing Japanese idols and groups to gain traction, which has had a massive impact on the Japanese music market.

In this article we break down how the Japanese music industry has developed over the past decades, not only musically, but also in regards to the culture it has created with its audience.