Already Asia’s top music market, Japan eyes selling pop to the world

The rookie music group XG drew a huge roar at the KCON LA festival, a gathering of Korean pop music fans, with a cover of I Am the Best, a 2011 hit from the group 2NE1.

The seven young women in skeleton-print costumes and tank tops heated up the stage like all K-pop ensembles, with vocal harmonies and synchronized dance moves. But none of the XG members singing in Los Angeles to the tens of thousands of fans last August was in fact Korean — they're all Japanese.

The 2-year-old group is on the verge gaining global popularity by emulating the K-pop system. Led by a producer who was born in Seattle between a Korean father and a Japanese mother, XG's young stars went through extensive training for more than three years before they debuted with an English song Tippy Toes and took the stage in Seoul. Since then, they've been traveling to festivals in New York and Abu Dhabi and selling out their first showcase in Japan. They plan a global tour starting in May.

“It's really about spreading XG all around the world to where the fans are,” Simon Park, the group's producer, said in an interview. “Our music is spreading in a really interesting way that we haven't seen before.”

XG is one of a growing number of Japanese acts traveling outside their home country to America and Europe. While XG has adopted K-pop's playbook, other J-pop stars such as the duo Yoasobi and singer Ado are tapping into another Japanese cultural export, anime, and licensing their music to animated TV shows.

It's a dramatic shift for the country, which had relied heavily on domestic audiences for decades. At $2.2 billion, Japan is the world's second largest music market after the U.S. But it's evolving. Revenue from digital sources rose to 35% last year, from about 21% in 2018, according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan.

XG's breakthrough has been aided by the transition to streaming, which helps J-pop songs travel more broadly. The country's share of the top 10,000 tracks played worldwide grew by more than half to 2.1% last year, according to researcher Luminate Data. While still small, it's approaching the size of Korean-language songs, which had about a 2.4% share in 2023.

Although K-pop became the first Asian music genre to successfully crack the U.S. market in a major way, J-pop has a longer history.

Japanese pop music sprouted a century ago, inspired by Western jazz and blues. The music evolved into folk and rock in the mid 20th century and incorporated electric sounds and jazz fusion, creating a “City Pop” genre in the 1980s.

J-pop started to gain global fame under Johnny Kitagawa, a powerful music mogul who paved the way for idol groups and controlled the Japanese industry for decades.

Kitagawa, who grew up in L.A. and was mesmerized by the musical “West Side Story,” formed boy bands in Japan with his production company Johnny & Associates. The genre thrived with the popularity of acts like SMAP and Arashi.

The music mogul built almost monopolistic power in the industry, as well as the media landscape, by controlling the artists' copyrights.