Monday March 17
 
14:12
 
Completely Missing The Point

The Register has a piece on Soribada - Korean Napster - now being legal.

The Register seems to have missed a crutial point, however. Everyone has already moved to 당나귀.

I really do wonder how music companies survive in Korea. I don’t know anyone who buys physical music there. No-one. The only music Koreans seem to pay for is background music on their Cyworld homepages and Coloring on their cell phones (the songs that you hear when you call a Korean person, instead of their ringtones). Maybe that’s how the music companies survive?!

When I read articles like The Register’s, I can’t help but cringe. I see it all the time about Korea and Japan - foreign journalists analyse a piece of news without any understanding of what’s really going on within the country. They end up completely missing the point.

It’s like when people write about Japan’s “i-mode” phenomenon and why mobile internet never succeeded in Britain. They completely missed the fact that Japanese companies gave Japanese access to mobile internet early, so locked them in early; that they put on useful content, such as being able to search for train times; and that Japanese dont have a culture of surfing at work. Brits who were used to flash and dynamic sites were asked to downgrade to text sites to see stock reports. It doesn’t take a genius to see why mobile internet failed.