Like many foreigners in Japan, Jon Lynch began his expatriate career as an English teacher. He now heads a company, Global Vision Media, which publishes two national Japanese-language music events magazines, Juice and Club Juice, and operates Juice TV. A recent chat with Englishman Lynch at his bustling Shibuya offices touched on Japan’s music scene and his new organization, events promoter Tiger Music, which operates Stereo, a club that opened in Roppongi last week with celebrity partners including Mani from Primal Scream.

How did you come to be a music publisher in Japan?
I was involved in it in college, but then came out here and began teaching business English. Around that time I started a translation agency, but at the same time was in a band. The band gradually became friends with more bands and started to put on quite a large event called UK Sound, so the translation company morphed into an event company… Our event flyers started to have multiple pages, so I decided to start a magazine. At the same time, we found there was no way to check the schedules of the “live houses” and clubs, so we started to collect that information and were able to build that up into a music-event portal magazine. So it morphed from just being fun into a big community that included the entire music business here.

Juice started as a bilingual magazine. How did it evolve into an all-Japanese magazine?
It started off bilingual because half our audience was foreign, but as we moved more into the Japanese music business, we found that foreigners were less and less interested. Ninety-five percent of our readers were not interested in the English aspect, so we just took it out. Our advertising doubled or tripled as soon as we did that—which is very interesting.

How do you compile all that data?
More than 200 venues send us schedules in quite a tight timeframe, so everyone just sleeps here and works on it the whole time.

How many concerts go on every night in Tokyo?
If you include jazz, there are probably about 500 venues, so you’d think there are a couple of hundred events a night. Tell me about a recent discovery. Nirgilis and Ana are two bands I really like. I’m interested in Japanese artists that could appeal to a Western audience as a long-term project. I’m thinking certain club jazz and electronica artists go down quite well. There are also a couple of reggae artists and urban artists that I like.

What are the challenges of running a music publishing business in Japan?
You need a very good people network, especially if you’re not Japanese; you need good knowledge of the scene; and you need people who can do professional graphic design, event production or what have you. You also need a niche that is quite clear and strong, so that everybody can work out what it is that you’re doing. I think we’ve done that by saying we’re a music event-related media company.

How do Japanese respond to having a foreigner as the head of a Japanese-language media company?
They don’t really know, or don’t care. We get treated as Japanese, which is not good in some ways. You can get away with a lot more in English.

Tell me about Tiger Music.
We’ve realized that a lot of the companies that want to market
to music fans aren’t getting the best situation they could hope for. For example, Japanese don’t drink much at live shows, but they do drink at festivals and parties. They have this feeling that when there’s a live show, they should take it seriously. So if you’re a drink marketing company, you would like to change the feeling of a live show to be more like that of a festival or party. One of the things we want to do with Tiger is to show places how to get money not only from the door but also from the bar, and that’s a Western concept.

What are some forthcoming Tiger events?
We’re planning after-parties with visiting artists, and shows with live musicians who work with DJs or club jazz acts. Also, we’re working with underground hip-hop and downbeat artists, and reggae and ska bands that cross over between live and club. We also do DJ events promoting the music of different countries. We have an event called British Underground, where we get new tracks sent over to us before anyone has played them, and another one called Soundscape that focuses on electronica.

What are your plans for Stereo?
It’s a concept that we’re calling “East mix West,” where we’re mixing up the crowd in Roppongi with a Shibuya music crowd that doesn’t usually go there. There’s a DJ bar, and every night we’ll be doing DJ parties there. The music should be both Japanese and Western and edgy, but such that you are still able to have a conversation and meet people. Also, every night there are a dozen artists visiting town. So the idea is to also get them kicking back with Japanese artists, so they can start collaborations—and a new music scene evolves from that space. Just getting Western people into Japanese music is an interesting project, and it could be a kind of window for people in the West. We’ve got some quite big Western artists including Mani from Primal Scream helping us set the place up.

How do you relax?
I do “guitar karaoke”—download chords of songs that I like—and read pop science, and recently I’ve been getting away with my daughter to go camping together.

See www.tigermusic.jp for more information.

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