Japanese Ticketer Pia To Build Tokyo-Area Arena

– Pia Music Arena
rendering

One of Japan’s biggest ticket vendors, Pia Corporation, announced it is building its first dedicated concert hall in the city of Yokohama just west of Tokyo. 

The Pia Music Arena will open in the spring of 2020 with a seating/standing capacity of 10,000. It will be situated in the Yokohama Minato Mirai area, which already contains a number of museums, a classical concert hall and the Yokohama Landmark Tower. 

The land under the new arena will be rented from Mitsubishi Estate on a 30-year-lease. 

The arena is good news for a city facing a shortage of music venues. For Pia, however, the move, which local media say is the company’s most expensive investment ever, completes its 40-plus-year evolution into a total entertainment presentation company, since it now means that Pia can unilaterally plan concerts, promote them and sell tickets to them. 

The timing seems perfect. According to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, the government recently reported that the “entertainment market” expanded by 50 percent in 2018 alone. Pia’s revenues amounted to 163.5 billion yen ($1.5 billion) in fiscal 2017, the third record year in a row. 

Pia was launched as an entertainment information magazine in 1972 by Hiroshi Yanai, who remains the company’s president to this day. At the time, the so-called college movement centered around anti-establishment protests had faded, and young people were looking to culture. Pia provided listings of concerts, plays, museum exhibitions, etc., in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and became an immediate hit.

In 1984, Pia moved into ticket sales and was the first vendor in Japan to computerize its ticketing system. The 1980s saw the rise of a powerful domestic popular music wave, both overground and underground, which Pia helped popularize and spread. Circulation continued to increase through the decade, and by the 1990s stood at about 800,000 copies a week nationwide. However, by the turn of the century, ticketing was by far the company’s core business. With the rise of the Internet, sales of the print version of Pia steadily declined, and the magazine was suspended in 2011. In addition, competing ticket vendors cut deeply into Pia’s profits starting in 2008 and for three years running the company was in the red. 

Consequently, Pia branched out into a solutions business for entertainment promoters, providing systems knowhow to theaters and concert organizers. At present, the company’s client list numbers around 500 and includes such huge concerns as the J. League professional soccer league and the Tokyo Sky Tree, a popular tourist attraction. 

Pia also launched its own music festival, Metrorock, which in 2018 attracted 86,000 people over a four-day period in both Tokyo and Osaka. Pia will also be involved with the World Expo 2025 that will be held in Osaka. Among other future endeavors is a new smart phone app that connects a person’s favorite artists to Pia online listings on a continuing basis.