FEATURE · 칼럼
From karaoke screens to Kuro Fes: how Nobuaki Okamoto brings music to listeners
To promote NIGHTMARE, he looked for space on karaoke waiting screens. At a festival, he proposed that a singer perform just one signature song. These were stories Office Walker’s Nobuaki Okamoto told SPICE in 2016. Both begin with a concrete picture of a first-time listener: how they might encounter a name and what they might want to hear at a show. That becomes the starting point for promotion and programming.
Published on August 26, 2016, the seventh instalment of The Producers ranged from his band years to record-label promotion, management and events. This article follows several episodes from that conversation. Against those practical examples, his idea of commitment sounds less like an abstract resolution than the work of taking responsibility for people and projects.
From a Nagoya drum kit to a record label
Okamoto played drums in a Nagoya guitar-rock band. Aiming to turn professional, they performed in Tokyo several times a month and toured other regions. After university he combined the band with a furniture-company job, then quit after signing with a production company. About two years followed trying to make music a livelihood. When the relationship with the agency ended, he abandoned the plan to support himself onstage.
He recalled deciding that if the professionals already around them could not make the band succeed, another place would not necessarily be easier. Music still returned to mind when he sought work. An advertisement in a jobs magazine led him to Nippon Crown and a post in Nagoya. The public-facing performance role ended, but bringing music to audiences continued from another position.
The regional office handled pop and enka. He recalled organising an in-store event at an enka specialist near Nagoya Station, then selling CDs at a rock show. It meant learning venues and selling methods beyond his own preferred music. After a little over six months he moved to Tokyo and took charge of NIGHTMARE’s promotion.
If television is difficult, find another screen
NIGHTMARE was an unfamiliar field for him at first. He preferred British-style rock and knew little about visual kei, but working alongside the band brought its effort into view. At the time, he explained, television and Tokyo FM access was difficult for visual-kei acts apart from a few major names. Instead of accepting refusal as an endpoint, he sought other contacts.
One was Big Echo, the karaoke chain operated by Nippon Crown’s parent company, Daiichi Kosho. He proposed NIGHTMARE for recommended-song videos shown during waiting time, and its video was selected from several proposals. Posters and screens across the national chain repeatedly placed the band’s name and music video before customers. It created an encounter distinct from simply adding concerts or shop appearances.
A Daiichi Kosho-sponsored FM programme offered another connection. More than three hundred people attended a public recording at Shibuya’s Spain-zaka Studio, he recalled. It made a band’s live popularity visible in a public media setting despite difficulty securing coverage. He described gradual recognition rather than one sudden breakthrough. Looking for a screen and a broadcast location revealed promotion in practical form.
Lessons from two bands of different sizes
He also handled guitar-rock band UNDER THE COUNTER. One was a newcomer playing to roughly one or two hundred people; the other had three thousand devoted fans but struggled to enter mainstream media. Their needs differed, yet both required a route beyond the current situation. Working with the two became a foundation for his later promotion work.
With UNDER THE COUNTER’s manager, he linked an Osaka FM station, the then Kansai edition of Pia and Tower Records stores in the region. A radio DJ wrote store recommendation cards, the magazine provided coverage and the broadcast offered concert invitations. Instead of separate campaigns, each contact pointed toward another. Like Big Echo, it gave enthusiasm a route into actual exposure and attendance.
The figures beside the idea of commitment
At twenty-seven he left Nippon Crown for the Office Walker group, working at its Blowgrow label jointly operated with avex. The interview also mentions J and Kirito’s activities at the time. Asked about management, he first stressed commitment: involvement in an artist’s life requires responsibility through to the end once one has chosen to take it on.
That responsibility includes dialogue and shared information. He argued for showing poor results as well as good figures, and sharing fan-club membership, merchandise turnover and spending per customer. The point was not to convert musical value into numbers, but to ensure that people making decisions together knew the conditions. Explaining disappointing outcomes without postponement linked commitment to everyday work.
Becoming an executive made direct conversation more necessary, he said. Without sitting together, one cannot know another person’s ideas or ideals, and new ideas are harder to produce. He used muzumuzu, a restless stirring of interest, for the feeling of wanting to work with a new artist. At the same time, he then wanted to concentrate on existing artists. He distinguished interest from the actual commitment of time.
The one song an audience wants at Kuro Fes
The later discussion of Kuro Fes translated those judgments into programming. Begun around Shigeru Matsuzaki’s 45th anniversary, it occupied a space between television and a music festival, he explained. Audiences could hear familiar television personalities sing in person and find new interest in a singer known for a signature song. Entertainment alongside music informed the line-up.
Set lengths were therefore not uniform. Citing Kohei Otomo performing only “ff (Fortissimo),” he said he proposed slots around the expected song and the flow of the whole event. The programme preferred changing encounters to a long set from every act. Not publishing a timetable at the time was also his decision, intended to encourage watching from start to finish.
Other changes lowered the barrier to attendance. After telling the family at a gyoza restaurant Matsuzaki frequented about the event, he heard that standing would be difficult for older people and added bench seating. He wanted longstanding supporters to attend too. A single-song slot and somewhere to sit show how decisions at different scales shape a performance.
Karaoke screens introduced a band’s name; a festival placed a familiar singer’s music directly before people. The interest in these examples lies in translating belief in artists into actual scenes of musical encounter. Commitment becomes practical: explaining conditions to colleagues, creating places audiences can attend and seeing an entrusted stage through to its end.