Japan is the second largest recorded music market in the world. South Korea is seventh. Between them they account for a large share of the physical sales, the fan commerce and the export growth that the rest of the industry spent the last decade trying to understand. Between them they also support, as far as we can establish, one dedicated music business publication in the local language.
That finding is the point of this piece. We went looking for the Japanese and Korean equivalents of the trade press that the English-speaking industry takes for granted, the publications a distribution team would read on a Monday morning. The list below is what we found. It is shorter than it should be, and the reason it is short matters more than any single entry on it.
How we checked
Every publication here was opened on its own site in October 2026 and judged on what it was actually publishing, not on reputation or on what a directory says about it. Where a site is a chart service or a research body rather than a publication, we say so. Where we could not read a site at all, we say that too, because a trade publication that cannot be opened from outside its home market is a fact about the market rather than a gap in our notes.
This is a companion to our earlier list of ten music business blogs worth reading in 2026, which closed on the argument that regional trade coverage is the thinnest part of the market. What follows is that argument checked against two specific countries.
Japan
Music Ally Japan
musically.jp. This is the one unambiguous answer to the question. Music Ally Japan launched in 2019 as a Japanese-language service for people working in the Japanese music business, built on a partnership with the London company whose English edition sits on our main reading list. It publishes news and analysis, runs the Music Ally Japan Focus podcast, and sends a free newsletter.
What makes it a trade publication rather than a news feed is the selection. The stories on the front page when we checked were Amazon Music adopting a rights and royalty system for music video, global music publishing revenue rising 9.6 percent to 11.2 billion dollars, and Sony Music requesting removal of more than 260,000 AI deepfake tracks. That last one we covered ourselves. A Japanese label manager and a Nigerian distribution manager reading their respective trade press that week were reading about the same thing, which is rarer than it sounds.
Best for: the only regular Japanese-language source that treats rights, royalties and platform economics as the main subject. Free newsletter and free news articles, with a paid MAJ Pro membership at 2,200 yen a month or 20,000 yen a year before tax for the strategy material.
Billboard Japan
billboard-japan.com. Published by Hanshin Contents Link under licence from Billboard. It runs the Japanese charts, artist news, interviews and a Chart Insight section.
Include it for the chart data and exclude it from your trade reading. When we checked, the most recent items were a first-week million for a Snow Man album, a singles chart led by 525,000 copies, a film theme song announcement and a US chart report. There is no business or industry section in the navigation. That is not a criticism of the site, which does what it sets out to do. It is a caution against treating a licensed local edition of a global brand as the local equivalent of that brand’s trade reporting.
Best for: Japanese chart positions and sales figures, in a format an outsider can read.
Oricon
oricon.co.jp. Oricon News is a general entertainment portal with charts attached, written for consumers rather than for the industry, and a good deal of it is sponsored content.
The interesting part sits beside it. Oricon runs separate business properties, including Oricon BiZ online, a monitor research panel and a customer satisfaction data operation. The industry-facing half of Oricon is a data and research business that sells to companies, not a publication that reports on them. That distinction is worth holding on to, because it recurs in Korea.
Best for: consumer-facing chart news, plus an example of a chart body monetising data rather than journalism.
Musicman
musicman.co.jp. On paper this is exactly what we were looking for: a music industry information site running since 1999, with a business news section, an industry yearbook behind it and a jobs board for the sector.
We could not read it. Every request we made returned HTTP 403, from four different networks and from an ordinary desktop browser, so we have no first-hand view of what it currently publishes. Search engines index its article pages with recent dates, so the site is live and working for somebody. We are listing it because excluding it would misrepresent the Japanese landscape, and flagging it honestly because including it as a verified recommendation would misrepresent our own checking.
Best for: potentially the deepest Japanese industry archive, if you can open it. Treat our entry as a pointer, not a review.
South Korea
Circle Chart, Opinion section
circlechart.kr. Circle Chart is the Korean national chart, operated by the Korea Popmusic Industry Association. Its Opinion section is the closest thing South Korea has to a music business desk, and it is considerably better than that framing makes it sound.
The columns are written by Kim Jin-woo, the chart’s senior research fellow, and they are built on the chart’s own data rather than on commentary. The piece published the day we checked reported that for September 2026, tracks released within three months took 13.5 percent of usage across the top 400, tracks within six months took 25.6 percent and tracks within eighteen months took 41.1 percent. An earlier annual review broke out distribution market share by company, including Kakao Entertainment leading streaming distribution and YG PLUS holding 33.0 percent of album distribution across the top 400.
Distribution market share, published by the national chart, for free. There is no English equivalent of that disclosure for most markets, and there is certainly no African equivalent.
Best for: hard numbers on Korean catalogue consumption, release decay and distribution share, straight from the chart that produces them.
KOCCA Music Industry White Paper
kocca.kr. The Korea Creative Content Agency publishes an annual music industry white paper. The 2025 edition was posted in December 2025 and covers 2024, with a domestic market review, listener surveys and separate chapters on the United States, China, Japan, France, Thailand and Argentina.
It is a government report rather than a publication, it arrives once a year, and by the time it lands the data is a year old. It is also the most complete single document on the Korean music economy that exists in public, which tells you something about what is not being published the other eleven months.
Best for: the annual structural picture, and unusually good coverage of export markets.
Idology
idology.kr. An idol pop webzine running since 2014, publishing weekly and monthly reviews, interviews, retrospectives and an analysis section. It was publishing the day we checked.
This is criticism, not business journalism, and we are including it with that label attached. It belongs on the list because serious sustained writing about K-pop as a form is itself scarce, and because anyone selling into the Korean market will understand the product better for reading people who take it seriously.
Best for: informed criticism of the thing the industry is actually selling.
IZM
izm.co.kr. A long-running Korean music webzine built around reviews, interviews and features, with a roster of named critics covering domestic and international releases. Active, broad in taste, and firmly on the criticism side of the line.
Best for: Korean critical coverage that is not confined to idol releases.
What is missing, and why it matters
Japan returned to growth in 2025, rising 8.9 percent, and remains the world’s second largest recorded music market and its largest physical market, according to the IFPI Global Music Report published in March 2026. The same report put global revenues at 31.7 billion dollars, up 6.4 percent, in an eleventh consecutive year of growth. Music Business Worldwide’s reading of the market table places South Korea seventh.
Two markets of that size, and the trade press consists of one Japanese-language publication that is the local arm of a British company, one site we could not open, a national chart’s column slot and a government white paper. Korea, the biggest cultural export story of the decade, has no commercial music business trade publication that we could find. Its best industry analysis comes from the body that runs the chart and the agency that writes the annual report. Both are good. Neither is independent of the industry it describes, and neither is going to break a story.
The pattern is the same one we described in Africa, and it is not a coincidence. A trade press needs enough companies willing to pay for information about each other, and enough of them willing to be written about. Markets that grow through a small number of large, vertically integrated companies do not generate that. They generate chart data and government reports, which are useful and which nobody has to be persuaded to publish.
What this means if you are distributing into these markets
Three practical consequences follow for anyone putting catalogue into Japan or Korea.
- Your market intelligence will be late. If the structural picture arrives annually in a white paper and the monthly picture arrives as a chart column, you are not going to read about a change in time to react to it. Build your own reporting on your own catalogue and treat the published sources as confirmation.
- Rules will reach you before coverage does. Both markets set significant terms administratively rather than commercially. Korea fixes its streaming revenue split by ministry approval, and Japan is phasing in payments to labels and performers for music played in shops by 2029, with the label’s nationality deciding who collects. Neither change was going to be explained to you by a trade publication.
- Neighbouring rights are where the unclaimed money is. Korea’s performer society collected 11.2 billion won from radio, cafes and webcasts, and reciprocity decides which of those streams a foreign artist can claim. That is the kind of detail that sits in a society’s annual report rather than in the news.
The commercial traffic, meanwhile, is moving regardless. Atlantic Music Group and Kakao Entertainment partnered on global K-pop development this year, which is the sort of deal that would generate a week of analysis in a market with a trade press and generated a press release in one without.
Corrections and additions
We will keep this list current the same way we keep the main one current, which means removing anything that stops publishing and saying so by name. If you work in either market and we have missed a publication, particularly a Korean one, we would rather be corrected than be the latest outlet to assert that the gap is empty. The address is on our contact page.
