Japan - things to learn from TOKYO FM
This was originally four posts; when salvaged from the Internet Archive in 2025, I pulled them all together.
Japan seems to laugh global standards in the face.
Have 110 or 220 volts for your electricity? Uniquely, Japan has 100 volts. At either 50Hz or 60Hz, incidentally, depending where you are in the country.
If you have a global ATM card, then be prepared for a walk. In Japan, to get your hands on some cash, you need to seek out a Citibank or a 7-Bank (the bank for the 7 Eleven). Almost nothing else will do. Oh, and don’t try spending any money using your credit card; foreign ones are taken sporadically if at all, so getting hold of some proper cash is a good plan.
If you’ve a mobile phone, then the chances are it probably won’t work – they don’t use GSM or CDMA here, but something called PDC. (If you’ve a 3G phone, like an iPhone 3G, it works).
Television looks beautiful here – broadcasting using a uniquely Japanese standard called Hi-Vision, necessitating hugely complex remote controls, at a screen size (1125 lines) and aspect ratio (5:3) and system (SBTVD-T) that nobody else uses in the world. (Some South American countries come close, apparently).
And the radio station I went to see was TOKYO FM, a radio station broadcasting to the Tokyo metropolitan area on 80.0MHz, a frequency which your western FM radio probably has never heard of before.
During my week in Japan earlier this month, I was lucky enough to meet Noriko, Motoko and Daisuke from TOKYO FM, who kindly showed me around their studio complex; and I discovered that TOKYO FM is at the cutting edge in Japan for many of the services it operates.
TOKYO FM is the first radio station in Japan to launch its own iPhone app.
FM broadcasting in Tokyo isn’t quite as good as it could be. Tokyo is full of tall buildings, narrow alleyways, hills and valleys, and a fearsome amount of electrical interference, whether from the all-pervasive train system or the neon signs that can be seen everywhere. For this reason TOKYO FM was keen to ensure there were more ways of listening to the station than FM.
They’re already working on ISDB-TSB (oh yes, that’ll be another almost uniquely Japanese standard), which adds text and graphical information to broadcast radio; but to get some ideas about what to put in (and what to leave out), TOKYO FM has been working on their own iPhone.
But the station’s iPhone app contains an ingenious solution to a peculiarly Japanese problem.
Until now, they’ve not been able to broadcast online. Part of this is related to music rights, but the other valid reason is one of cannibalisation. TOKYO FM is also associated with 37 other radio stations across Japan, through the Japan FM Network Association. The advertising and programming for the Tokyo station is intended for Tokyo and not Osaka, for example, and if they were to offer TOKYO FM across other areas of Japan, they might cannibalise the audience of these local radio stations.
Faced with the same problem for their iPhone app, they hit on a novel solution: they use the inbuilt GPS system to check where the listener is. If they’re within TOKYO FM’s broadcast area, they can listen on the iPhone. If they’re not, they can’t. And so far at least, this is proving successful for the music rights holders and the business as a whole. A neat technological solution to a particularly thorny problem.
The TOKYO FM iPhone app, pictured above, is available in the iTunes store in Japan only. “Wonderful World” is the name of the programme, and “Reversed” is the current song playing. And yes, of course, you can buy the track online via the iTunes music store.
Just like in Europe, listening to the radio on a mobile phone is more and more popular. Working with one of the big operators, TOKYO FM has done a neat trick – augmenting the listening experience over FM with additional information via IP. The concept is similar to Nokia’s Visual Radio – it uses FM for the audio and additional stuff over IP. You tell the phone where you live, and the FM radio app configures the phone to include the local radio stations it should be able to pick up, and the additional information. Unlike Visual Radio, the additional information just appears, without having to manually switch the visual radio service on.
Not only can TOKYO FM monetise their listeners by showing them advertising, they can also sell the songs they play; TOKYO FM runs its own mobile download service. Advertising can be interactive, too. And the app can even be ’skinned’ for your favourite radio station.
This is a really interesting way of augmenting the user experience: using FM broadcast’s reliability and scalability, but additional personalisation and information over IP. The push notification is operated by the mobile phone operator – KDDI in this case – rather than the broadcaster.
(As an aside, RadioDNS is very similar to this, but since RadioDNS operates on what the radio can actually receive, rather than any preset pre-configured list, it requires no user setup; and the broadcaster is more in control of the messages that appear.)
And it’s a good job that TOKYO FM is trying hard to make their listening experience as good as it can be; since mobile phones also pick up live television, which is broadcast as well in a special (and non-standard, of course) way. Here’s an image of the same phone watching the television – with some of the ad banners that also appear when listening. The ad banners are there because the internet browser controls are available to the phone’s OS in other applications; and the TV broadcasts use ISDB-T HD television (yes, they’re actually, bizarrely, HD broadcasts, even though the display probably won’t be the resolution that HD actually makes available.
In the UK, there’s three words that fill people throughout radio with dread: “the PRS return”. UK radio stations have to reconcile and email their Selector logs off to the music rights holders (PRS and PPL), so that these bodies know what songs have been played and, potentially, share the money with the music artists. It’s a laborious process, since you need to know exactly was and wasn’t played, and include music from commercials and jingles.
But, TOKYO FM don’t email their Selector logs off every month to their equivalent of PRS or PPL. Instead, the music rights people in Japan have direct access to their now-playing information – right off the playout system.
The benefits of this are immense. Radio programmers must get the now-playing information correct before the song’s played – and therefore it drips through correctly to every other system and platform that the station’s available on. Record companies know exactly what’s played the minute TOKYO FM plays it. Nobody has to reconcile logs. Travel beds would be always exactly timed.
Not only does this method make the multi-platform product better for TOKYO FM, it also saves them money – because they get a discount for doing their music returns in this way.
Brilliant! Now, where’s PRS’s telephone number. I’ve an idea for them.
I’m grateful for Nik Goodman for contacting TOKYO FM on my behalf, for Noriko at TOKYO FM for helping organise my meeting; and to the makers of Marmite for importing their splendid product into Japan, so I could give them each a little pot of England by way of thanks. Rather brilliantly, Daisuke has not only been enjoying his Marmite, he’s also tweeted about it, and taken a picture, which is the first time, I think, I’ve seen someone publicly enjoy a present I’ve given them.