LAST EDITED ON Jun-06-04 AT 02:00 PM (PDT)
 
Music
One question that perplexes me is whether the JPop side of the show was a success. In many ways, it was a mixed story. We managed to bring in nearly 4,000 to a sold-out Arena floor for the TMR/Nami Tamaki concert. We did the most elaborate concert to date as well as the first major paid jpop concert on the West Coast. The problem was that these Jpop fans that attended the concert did not also attend the convention, so we only brought in about 3,000 people to the convention. The overall throughput was about 5,500 people coming through PMX. Our mistake was assuming that one could act as a hook for the other. Once we find the formula, the convention should be a HUGE success.

Dates
A lot of negative factors came into play with our dates. First, Fanime plopped down on the same weekend after we signed for our dates. We later learned that we were during the same weekend that proms and graduations were scheduled. This cost us a lot of the high school and college students. I have spoken to Fanime and unfortunately; they signed a multi-year agreement that they cannot get out of. We are addressing this issue by moving dates to a more friendly date.

Layouts
I think I made many mistakes in the layout of the convention. I left too much open space and the convention didn’t feel crowded enough to have a critical mass and create the feel of a lot of energy. In particular, the Exhibit Hall felt empty and the dealers complained of the lack of a buying frenzy. For PMX05, I want to move everything into a smaller venue. This will create a better feel of energy and excitement. The same will apply to the exhibit hall as well, but unfortunately, we will need to cap the number of exhibitors.

Defining the convention:
I still feel that the concept is strong. However, integrating them will be much more difficult than I first imagined. The idea of moving the TMR concert to a separate day and opening it to the public worked quite well. We miscalculated on the pricing, but we did bring in LOTS of people who would not otherwise come to a convention where the concert ticket price was bundled with the cost of membership. However, many didn’t have an interest in the other aspects of Asian culture and left after the concert. This tells me that Jpop has a lot of potential in the Los Angeles market, but we don’t yet know how to properly bring it into the fold.

One interesting twist to PMX was the fact that we lost a lot of the younger market to graduations/proms/finals. This resulted in an older age demographic that created a lot of interesting problems in the convention. The older fans had little interest in watching anime. The video rooms were fairly empty. The restaurants and bars did very good business. They also had little interest in buying anime. The dealers that did unusually well were the ones with high end collectable items. The sword dealers, cel dealers, etc. were raving about the convention and lined up to buy the booths for next year. The ones selling items that younger fans might want did fairly poorly.

The Asian Cinema programming went reasonably well. The biggest complaint was counter-programming videos against each other. We will reduce the track to one track and reduce the room size to better suit the growing nature of Asian Cinema. The sponsoring companies wanted to see overflowing viewing rooms rather than nicer ones that were not completely packed.

Japanese wrestling was a surprise success. A lot of attendees loved it and said they will start attending some of the New Japan Pro Wrestling matches held in Los Angeles.

Cars were a mixed bag. The fact that we didn’t pull in the younger college/high school crowd meant that we lost part of the core market for the auto display. Moving away from graduations/finals/proms should move things significantly for next year.

For PMX05, I think the direction to go will be to move away from too many video rooms. It sounds like the interests are more diverse and that the older demographics are less and less interested in watching videos. I have requests from martial artists and stunt teams to do demonstrations all day and this might be a good use of the function space. I’d like to do concerts again, but scale down on the complexity. The TMR/Nami concert was a work of art, but the complexity level was so high that a lot of us were burned out before the convention even began.

Staff
The part of the convention that I am most proud of is the staff. They worked marvelously under pressure and did the work of a team twice its size. Everyone pitched in at-con and we didn’t have any of the usual “that’s not my job” mentality. I was actually amazed at how quickly staffers stepped up to help to cover other staffer’s mistakes. I saw very little of the, “What do I get out of this?” mentality and actually, many staffers put money out of their pockets to help the con in its first year and are refusing to ask for reimbursement. The unified vision of a creative community of everything Asian and to a lesser degree, a fan community made up of staffers and fans has motivated many of them to throw themselves into the convention.

>The problem was
>that these Jpop fans that attended the concert did not also attend the
>convention, so we only brought in about 3,000 people to the
>convention.

This is a problem that many cons need to address. They're bringing in these acts but are offering little to no other programming with the J-Pop fan in mind. PMX (and other cons) needs to demonstrate to the fans that they have a reason to stick around, such as heavy rotation of music videos/concerts or a wide selection of merchandise (many dealers only carry select products at incredibly inflated prices).

>We miscalculated on the pricing, but we did bring in LOTS
>of people who would not otherwise come to a convention where the
>concert ticket price was bundled with the cost of membership.

Now, you don't know that for sure. Of course they still wouldn't be interested in the rest of the convention, but we've had many people come to Texas conventions and just buy one-day passes for concerts. As long as the price is right, people will come.

http://www.zoemi.com/ | http://www.j-radio.org/ | http://www.j-poop.com/

http://www.jpoproom.com/

Yeah, the dates was a killer which on the same weekend of Fanime and graduation / final exams. Labor Day weekend for next year is a good idea, I actually hope for a con near Christmas though since there is no con around that time, and half a year from those summer cons, so people are more hungry for it if it helds near Christmas...just my assumption though.

It's certainly a tough task to mix Jpop, anime and other asian cultures into one convention. Even in Japan, they don't have an event simply mixing Jpop and anime together, PMX indeed has tried something experimental. For the Jpop concert, now I think PMX knows about the average prices of what fans can afford. Also, I think more Jpop fans would have went to PMX if it's a part of the PMX events. Like they have to buy at least the 1 day PMX memberships first in order to buy the concert tickets. TMR is a good start though, at least he has sung some anime songs before, so there're some fans already in the US which are familiar with his songs. Definitely for next year, PMX needs a couple voice actors/actresses, this will fill the gap between Jpop and anime as well.

A couple ideas for PMX next year is to have some other events for Jpop fans at PMX other than the guest panel and autograph session. For example, a Jpop Idol singing contest with TMR as the judge. A fan club liked event, sort of like the Meet the Guest reception which fans can chat and party with their idols. As I talked with some Jpop fans, yeah, they were only here for the concert, nothing else, so it would be nice to have more events for them to participate in.

For next year, I think it's better for PMX to stick with Japanese cultures mainly like Jpop and anime. Chinese rock, Korean pop...etc can be expanding more gradually. Right now, PMX should focus on mixing Jpop and anime into a successful event first. At this moment, branching out too much in a variety of asian cultures may not be a good thing.