Can the digital economy help us diversify Japanese arts?

As with Japan, the creative arts in the Philippines are largely dominated by a few fields - in their case, singing, dancing, and acting, owing to the ubiquity of the major networks and their multi-talented stars.

The lack of diversity in popular arts presents several serious problems, no matter the country.

For one, a country’s cultural heritage deserves to be captured and conveyed in a wide variety of mediums - it should not be monopolized to only a few fields. For another, other artistic fields can be a source of prosperity for the country as a whole. Just look at the literary industry in London, or architecture in France, or fashion design in New York. Like them, Asian countries like Japan and the Philippines can and should also boast of their own successful creative hubs.

To do so, Asian countries must first acknowledge that creative industry can bring as much economic value as more traditional fields like retail, real estate, or even business process outsourcing (BPO). One might argue that we need to diversify into more creative fields in order to curb the impact of downtrends on other industries, such as BPO’s slowing growth due to the rise of automation and artificial intelligence.

Asian countries cannot create a world-class creative hub overnight, of course, as there are just too many necessary resources (domain expertise, industry education, professional development, and so on) that would take years to build and gather.

Fortunately, the digital economy may help us accelerate the diversification of Asian countries into more creative fields. One such example from the Philippines is the recently launched Kumu, a content and livestreaming app founded by Roland Ros, Rexy Dorado, Andrew Pineda, and Clare Ros. On the Kumu app, anyone can be a livestreamer.

The operative word there is anyone. While there are talents in singing, dancing, and acting - many of them wildly unique from the country’s typical television fare - there are also content creators who would never see the light of day on mainstream outlets. These include Babayin artists, mom vloggers, tour guides, food critics, product developers, cultural storytellers, and everyone in between. You can view Kumu then as an equalizer: It lowers the barrier of entry to having a global audience to almost nothing (you just need a smartphone and the courage to share your talent).

So what happens when any artist can have an immediate audience of interested viewers? Kumu is still in its very early stages, but the results so far are promising. The platform has activated a tipping feature that enables viewers to give their favorite artists digital gifts that correspond to real-world money. This feature is in keeping with the platform’s bid to create what it calls financially successful creatives, or FSCs for short. Such ambitions may be a first in Southeast Asia, but are common in the industry - livestreamers abroad, such as in the United States and China, frequently draw in enough tips with their livestreams to count it as a part- or even full-time job.  

Japanese entrepreneurs and business leaders, particularly those who operate in the digital economy, should look to Kumu as a kind of case study. You can think of Japanese arts as a bell curve. Currently, the mainstream studios, publications, and outlets only cater to the top half of the bell curve - the popular arts that will appeal to the lion’s share of Japanese at home and abroad. There is a long tail of other arts, including everything from spoken word to street art, that are being overlooked because individually they represent small niches. Japanese founders would be wise to aggregate these communities into larger digital platforms and marketplaces that more efficiently connect talents with fans, as part of the bid to sustainably accelerate the diversification of the country’s arts.   

The writer is a registered nurse and aspiring livestreamer, based in Manila, Philippines.

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