Soft On Demand quits Fanza: is the end of Fanza's JAV world domination near?

Published : September 22nd, 2021 Written by WoodOfTheRisingSun

Perhaps approaching a decade now, the JAV industry has been rather stable structurally. Individual studios may come and go (but often changing only the logos), but there's an understanding if not explicitly written code of conduct. Agents (and scouts) recruit and manage talents, studios produce films which are packaged as DVD, Blu-Ray or digital (download or streaming) and sold on DMM/Fanza, plus Amazon's a minor competitor to DMM, and street shops. But it shouldn't surprise you, it isn't always stable. And we might be, right now, witness a historic moment: the shake up of the distribution hegemony that we all know and love and hate as DMM/Fanza. The only major evolution in recent years is the post-scandals reform (delistings) and fading of uncensored industry. 

At the beginning, VHS rentals were dominant, which gave way to DVD rental and later DVD purchase became the norm. And then street corner shops gave way to online giants, eventually DMM/Fanza had a lock-grip on the industry and digital releases finally overtaking physical media. For distribution and retails it's pretty much unthinkable to bypass DMM entirely. It achieved this by having their parent organization, WILL, spawned or swallowed up many of the top and/or biggest studios, including S1, Moodyz, IdeaPocket, Premium, Wanz Factory, E-Body, Oppai, Fitch, kawaii*, Attackers, Hunter, Madonna, and the list goes on and on. It might actually be easier to make a list of JAV studios not in the WILL group. WILL's studios mostly make their titles exclusively on DMM. Keeping an account on DMM for their exclusive titles is, therefore, virtually compulsory for fans. With a monopolistic position of strength in retail distribution, DMM can pretty much tax (rumored to be around 70%) the studios to the brink of starvation.

Just more than a year ago I bought you the story of Faleno. The entire industry was watching. They were wondering if Faleno would survive, or thrive, or surrender, or just fold up and disappear without a whimper.  Turns out Faleno managed better than mere survival, they even managed to spawn a second studio Dahlia, formally achieving the status of a (minimalist) conglomerate: a streaming platform, multiple studios and multiple labels. A huge factor, not at all obvious from the beginning, is that WILL’s empire doesn’t extend to the agencies. Many top agencies allowed their established top idols to sign onto the unproven upstart, well a very well funded upstart. This continued to happen as both established talents and hot new recruits are (seemingly) fairly split between different studios, quietly admitting Faleno to the old boy club of top studios. The sustainable growth may not be spectacular, but now looking back, and remembering Japanese business world aversion to rocking the boat, what happened is downright remarkable.

Now what comes next may not be a direct result... but one wonders... In Feb 2021, Prestige withdrew from Fanza, overnight taking away their future, current and past titles.  It was so unexpected that Pretige's new releases faded from my own radar screen for months, because most of my browsing and research sites failed to adapt to the disappearance of Prestige titles from DMM platform. (the Prestige, First Star, and Maxing covers below don't link to R18, because they are taken off R18 along with Fanza)

The declines of all empires don't look like crashes, but more like the rusting away of a giant ship. No one could understand what's happening in front of our eyes. Sure "many" studios soon followed suit but all of these minor studios (with a tiny exception being First Star) added up to nothing on my radar screen. Until Maxing also joined the exodus. But still, I dismissed it, Maxing's best days were long in the past. It was still too early to count the final days of DMM hegemony.  

Now a second big player has served notice: SoftOnDemand has withdrawn all new titles (released in and after July) from Fanza, and customers who preordered SOD's October releases have received the cancellation notice.  But unlike Prestige's withdrawal, this current motion wasn't formally announced or explained by either DMM or SOD. After some inquiries by fans and industry watchers, it only came out via "unnamed sources" that indeed it was a withdrawal rather than a, say, computer/human error. However, the two sides are still in negotiations and the lack of formal announcement means that no permanent decision one way or another has been made. It's actually quite possible one day next week the SOD titles would be found on Fanza again as if nothing had ever happened. Or... maybe, just maybe, neither side would budge and SOD will fully withdraw from Fanza, taking its huge 26 years catalog off the platform. (notice the below SOD titles don't include their latest releases)

In retrospect, it's not a surprise that Prestige and SOD are the first two major players to moves against WILL. As mentioned in Part 2, they were the two studios that agreed to provide content to streaming provider H-Next (Faleno's parent). SOD's cooperation with H-Next grew quietly and deeply. On one hand, SOD contents are streamable on H-Next, on the other hand, physical copies of Faleno's productions are sold on SOD's website (an until-now forgettable challenger to DMM). SOD and H-Next/Faleno aren't exactly in bed together, but there could well be an unspoken conspiracy between Prestige, Maxing, SOD and Faleno to erode DMM's hegemony. 

Are more non-WILL studios going to join the revolt? Perhaps, but I think WILL/DMM/Fanza has started noticing.  One hint is that SOD's move isn't final yet and active negotiation is still grinding. More likely, the SOD issue will resolve soon, one way or the other. But I'm going to guess that the next major moves won't be visible for a while. Fanza must do something to halt the exodus, the easiest (and perhaps painful) thing to do is cut their tarrif on the retail operation, this is the single biggest hurt. Fanza cannot suffer another major player exiting, already the fandom has become skeptical of the daily, weekly, monthly and annual idol and DVD rankings made by Fanza. That is, there were mumbles about the veracity of the rankings even before Prestige's exit. Now if Faleno, Prestige, Maxing and SOD are all missing from the statistics, would anyone even care about the Fanza ranking? Once you give up the superpower status, everything could become 10x more difficult and less profitable.

Comments


spiderphil 3 years ago
This was a good reading, I was stuck when I couldn't find any older First Star videos on R18. The new First Star material is weird. I'll be sad if SOD leaves, Ill probably stop watching JAV if I cant find the videos, but at least they left their old content.
ZENRA 3 years ago

The IPPA is both an ethics company and an industry oversight organization similar to the FSC in USA. Please see our Trust and Safety page for more information.

DigaRW 3 years ago
I see. I thought they are being only industry oversight organization as they officially inaugurated the OCCN. Thanks for correcting.
DigaRW 3 years ago
In Chinese blog, they say the main reason SOD took of their product in Fanza because there is conflicting ethics between Fanza ethic and the one who does review SOD product. Previously JCRC was the one who review SOD products, but SOD lately use OCCN service to review their products starting on May 2021. This somewhat allow them to make mosaic thinner. I'm not sure if this is true, but this may the reason why there is such sudden action.
ZENRA 3 years ago

I compared some OCCN (?) mosaics with new DMM studio releases (IPPA ethics I think) and it does not appear any thinner.

DigaRW 3 years ago
I actually didn't pay much attention on the censor, but someone confirmed that the mosaic is kinda bit more obscene than before at certain part. But might be no difference though. Also, IPPA is not kind of ethic company that reviewing works. In fact OCCN was inaugurated by them. Other company that provide reviewing service such as JVPS, VSIC, and JCRC.
drk 3 years ago
On a separate note, how tight is Fanza's control over the studios? Are they partially independent or wholly-owned by Fanza?
ZENRA 3 years ago

Please do a Google image search for "primer timeline" to see the relationship between "DMM-owned" studios and Fanza.

drk 3 years ago
So I guess that a good summary of the relationship is: "No one knows what it means, but it's provocative ... it gets the people going!" ?
drk 3 years ago
I'm rooting for HerHers (herhers . love). Their selling point is: bigger cut to the studio and royalties (eyeballing the charts in their promo materials says 55% studio, 20% actress, 25% them vs fanza's 35% studio, 65% fanza). They launched a beta version only 3 weeks ago, so the product offering is kinda small, but it's growing steadily. It comes out of beta at the end of October.No English front-end yet, but as of yesterday they starting accepting overseas card payments (There was a minor issue with no billing address fields).
ZENRA 3 years ago

HerHers can be the Bandcamp of JAV if they do everything right.

drk 3 years ago
Could you rephrase? I never heard of Bandcamp (I'm not from North America).Also they were surprisingly eager to engage with me via twitter DM's to find out what was going on with the payments (the money was put on hold on my end, but store rejected the transaction - no issues, as each time cash was 'released' by my bank after a week or so).
ZENRA 3 years ago

Bandcamp gives artists a bigger cut than buying the same music on Amazon, Apple, etc. If your favorite bands use them, I'd suggest buying there over other outlets. You also have the option to set your own price so if the band asks $5USD for the album, you can pay $8USD or something if you want to be generous.

PS, please stick to one email address if you want your replies to be listed in our comment fields faster.

short hair lover 3 years ago
While obviously it sucks that it means them leaving R18, if DMM's cut is that severe I support them. I don't have a problem with using multiple stores since i do it with gaming too like some games being exclusive to epic store etc. I only hope that if they completely switch, they make an english interface or something to allow us to buy easier and have english for support. Only reason why i really haven't used mgstage is if i had any trouble and needed to contact support, i need to do it in japanese. (And they require a phone number when you purchase ? same reason why i didn't make a h-next account but they ask during account creation phase rather than the cc info page)

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