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The story
It’s been announced that the 2027 ceremony for the domestic music award “MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN (MAJ)” will be held at TOYOTA ARENA TOKYO on June 19, 2027, marking the second year running at this venue after 2026. On the Hello! Project board, posters voiced hope that Juice=Juice could follow in the footsteps of this year’s idol-category winners, =LOVE and FRUITS ZIPPER — but the thread quickly turned into a heated argument, as people compared MAJ to the Japan Record Award (whose judges were recently caught up in a tie-up sponsorship scandal) and debated just how fair MAJ’s voting really is and what its third-party audit actually proves.
It was announced on the 10th that “MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2027,” one of Japan’s largest international music awards, will hold its ceremony at TOYOTA ARENA TOKYO on June 19, 2027. This marks the second consecutive year the event will be held at this venue, following 2026.
So who’s bringing it home for Hello! Project this year?!
Source: encount.press / Original article here
What people said
https://kizuna.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/morningcoffee/1794306650/
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/9a72fe102361687277b71956c63518ba370030c2
Shukan Bunshun Online reported that the operating company behind web media outlet "Model Press" — whose president served as a Japan Record Award judge — had pitched tie-up advertising deals to multiple record labels during the judging period. The operating company, Net Native, confirmed the facts in a written response to the Asahi Shimbun on November 9.
Even performance-wise, you need that easy-to-read K-pop style 'Look how amazing this is!' punch to actually win.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/2babbbabee63e5f532cc273fe1a1ac88bfbcbbd0
MAJ voters: a large, open pool.
Which one's easier to rig is obvious as daylight.
So there's genuinely a chance even a small-time Hello! Project act like Juice=Juice could snag the Idol Performance Award next year.
They're about 5,000 qualified, registered music-industry professionals. How is that 'unspecified'?
https://www.ceipa.net/static/ceipa/feature/maj/maj_partner.png
Let me break it down so even you can get it:
What CEIPA (the organizer) asked Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (a major accounting firm) to do was:
'Check whether the voting followed the rulebook, based on a set list of items, and just report back the facts.'
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That's it. Some idiots are mistaking this for a real audit.
A normal audit vouches that 'overall, everything was fair.'
MAJ's audit only checks a predetermined list of items and reports 'here's what we found' — nothing more.
So yes, they confirmed 'the procedures followed the rules,' but no, they never guaranteed 'the result was absolutely fair.'
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
“MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN (MAJ)” is a relatively new award hosted by the Japanese music-industry body CEIPA, with winners chosen by a vote of roughly 5,000 qualified music-industry professionals. It emerged against a backdrop of long-standing criticism of the Japan Record Award over issues like “ratings-driven decisions” and “opaque judging.” As quoted in the thread, the most recent Record Award was indeed hit by reports that the company behind one of its judges had pitched tie-up advertising deals to record labels during the judging period, plus a separate TBS-related scandal involving a ¥15 million sales pitch — and that’s exactly what’s fueling the split between “MAJ is still the fairer one” and “nah, it’s still all about money.” Where the thread’s opinions diverged most was over the nature of the third-party “audit” CEIPA has introduced. A standard audit, which vouches for overall fairness, differs in scope from the “Agreed-Upon Procedures (AUP)” engagement MAJ actually uses, which only confirms whether set procedures were followed — a distinction posters on both sides seemed to miss, with some insisting “there’s an audit, so it must be fair” and others countering “an audit like that means nothing,” fueling a pointless back-and-forth. One point readers can easily misunderstand is that MAJ’s roughly 5,000 voters are a publicly disclosed number — a fundamentally different system design from the Record Award, where the judging panel was small.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “The Grand Farce ‘MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2027’ Gets Held Yet Again, Completely Unashamed!!.”
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