Having been in the hot seat of the ACG community, I’ve come learn a lot of important things about organising events and the realities of business. As a fan myself, I’ve always lamented on the lack of quality anime-related events, and the lack of genuine, affordable anime goods, especially DVDs.

The past few years, though, have been very good times for the Malaysian otaku. Internet speed has improved by leaps and bounds (still crappy, but we can never have enough, right?), hard disks have become cheaper, more channels have been opened that made purchasing and owning imported anime goods so much easier. Events have been growing in quantity, quality and scale as well.

Five years ago, getting 500 visitors to an event is considered an achievement. Recent trends however see major fan-organised ACG events clocking up 3000, 5000, and in the case of Comic Fiesta 2009, it even went past the 7000 visitors mark. If that’s not a sign of growth, I don’t know what is.

For the folks behind the scenes, in order to open the doors of opportunity, and to continue to open new ones, they knew that the first step was first to create awareness. After there’s awareness, there’s building the hype. Once there’s a sizable crowd of well-informed fans, a bulk of whom are financially capable consumers and are excited to spend on the things they love, the anime business here begins its ascent.

A big sign of that ascent is the upcoming May’n concert here in KL. Seeing how it’s being organized by the guys at Sozo – the people who brought us AFA – I was genuinely surprised. Putting some thought into it, I realised what was really going on here. Let’s look at this from the perspective of a Japanese record label.

Let’s say I’m the CEO of Flying Dog (lol), and I look at a paltry group of Southeast Asians with their measly market share of roughly around 5 million potential consumers (compared to the market share in Japan). I receive a proposal to send in one of my artists there for a concert, supposedly seeing a chance to pierce the SEA market.

Without having any past concerts to base from, or any idea what the SEA market is like, I can’t afford to send in one of my top artists and waste their time. If I can send them to Fukuoka and generate 3 million yen from a concert there, is there a chance that a concert in SEA can generate a higher figure?

So, let me just send a fresh, upcoming artist and test the waters. If I send in one of my assets and the sales don’t look very impressive, why should I bother wasting my talents’ time when they can generate a much bigger profit elsewhere? It doesn’t sound very nice, but hey, that’s the reality of business for you.

That’s where you, me and all the ACG fans in Southeast Asia come in. I’m sure you’d love to watch your favourite singers perform live, here in Malaysia instead of Singapore or Indonesia, right? I sure as hell want to watch Maaya Sakamoto, Yoko Kanno or even Utada Hikaru perform here, but all that has to start somewhere.

Here’s where the ball starts rolling. It’s a big heavy ball to roll, but if we join hands and make it happen, trust me, we can start seeing things we never dreamed possible just 5 years ago. Things are a-changing, a lot of people are doing all they can, yet ultimately, it can’t happen without you.

So do your part, join the excitement and let’s show the Japs that we’re no small fry to sniff at!

This post is tagged

This post filed in *Feature, *OMG REAL LIFE!, *Otaku