"Get a helicopter for the Emperor!"
The "Emperor"--also known as Tom Yoda--was running late. The 55-year-old chairman of Avex, Japan's most successful dance-music label, was booked to catch a 5pm flight from Narita to Seattle, but at 3pm he was still playing host at a lavish press conference for the opening of Velfarre, the mammoth Roppongi disco. A technical foul-up had delayed the event by some 30 minutes, and a wave of anxiety was rippling through his employees. Amiable as he could be, the emperor was not known for tolerating mistakes. Before he had even stepped off the podium, word was spreading through the organization: get him to Narita--fast--even if it means hiring a chopper.

Hailing a helicopter is, of course, not quite as simple as flagging a cab; Yoda ended up missing his flight to Seattle, where he was to preside over a showcase concert of a newly-signed star. But the July 1993 incident typifies the brash, money-is-no-object style of Avex, Yoda's organization.

No one has escaped the company's blitzkrieg of promotions. Commercials capped with the familiar, squiggly logo and the corporate catch-phrase--"Dance Music For The '90s"--dominate late-night television. Billboards screaming the Avex name plaster almost every major train station; entire music-TV programs are funded by the company and commercials featuring the label's stars promote everything from motor scooters to soft drinks.

Indeed, the Avex Group's profile is almost as high as that of its biggest-selling act, the saccharine DJ/pop team "trf." Since debuting two-and-a-half years ago, trf's sales on the Avex Trax label have topped a mind-boggling 16 million albums and singles. For this fiscal year, the Avex Group projects a gross income of some Y35 billion--almost one-third as much as the Y112 billion earned last year by Japan's biggest record company, Sony Music Entertainment.

"No other music company has made any headway on the dance scene," says one Tokyo-based industry source. "Alfa Records faded out with Eurobeat, then came Toshiba-EMI with Hammer, who faded out, and then Avex came in. Right now, dance music is Avex." A half-dozen years ago, no one would have believed it.

MAX MATSUURA COULD feel it. The young employee at a Yokohama CD-rental shop had been studying his customers' buying habits with increasing interest. He was sure that dance music was going to be very big indeed and he wanted to be a part of it. All he needed was the right support; he already had a reputation among friends and colleagues for his uncanny senken no mei, or trend-spotting talent.

Matsuura was only 24 years old in 1988 when he ran into an ex-salaryman named Ken Suzuki. Suzuki had recently forsaken a desk job in the fashion industry and had struck out on his own as an entrepreneur. In April of that year, Matsuura, Suzuki and two other partners launched a small business out of a cramped office in suburban Machida. They named their company Audio Visual Experience--or Avex.

The Avex team hatched a plan to import dance-music compilations from countries such as Italy and the Netherlands. For repertoire they would rely on Matsuura's instincts. They would get a jump on the major labels, whose slow, consensus-building business practices left them lurching like dinosaurs in the racy market of dance-music. Unfortunately, neither Suzuki, Matsuura nor their two partners had much in the way of international contacts. Then, two months later, a friend of Matsuura's turned up at the office with a worldly, smooth-talking businessman some 25 years Matsuura's senior. Avex's problem, it seemed, had been solved. Tom Yoda, a successful international executive, was interested in working with the team.

Benny Goodman's band members used to describe their leader's angry stare as "The Ray." Yoda has the same kind of strangely detached, laser-like gaze, an effect which is magnified by his cool, rimless glasses. As his "Emperor" moniker suggests, he is very much the boss--a sometimes imperious chief who is not averse to publicly dressing-down his top executives. In his subdued Saville Row suits, silk ties and a formidable-looking gold Rolex, he appears to be in great physical shape. Yoda's other nicknames confirm his self-confessed workaholic persona. He seems unconcerned--indeed, amused--that he is also known to his employees as "Cyborg" and three variations on the name "Clone."

"`Clone 1' is the really nice, charming, calm Tom Yoda," he says, with obvious relish. "If they call me `Clone 2,' it means I'm getting tired and a little bit rough. And `Clone 3' means `stay away today.'"

A graduate of Meiji University's management program, Yoda spent six years in the export division of a medical equipment manufacturer before crossing over in 1969 to Sansui Electronics, the hi-fi maker. After rising to the post of general manager of Sansui's Los Angeles office, he became president of Sansui America and a member of its board of directors. But in 1988, Yoda shocked his colleagues by announcing that he was quitting the company and the hardware business altogether. "The exchange rate situation made me feel it was the end of road for hardware manufacturing," he says. "My new business keywords were `software and imports,' rather than `hardware and exports.'"

Yoda had made a shrewd move. Within a couple of years, Sansui would fall victim to a takeover by the ill-fated British enterprise Polly Peck. By then, however, Yoda was working as a corporate consultant and import agent. In June of the same year, an American friend in the music industry asked him to find a Japanese company interested in importing CDs. "I talked with many people here and then I met the people from Avex," says Yoda. "They had just opened their office, they were wanting to import and they were looking for someone to do business with." After his first visit to the small Machida office, Yoda agreed to join the fledgling company in the semi-official capacity of advisor.

It soon became clear that Yoda's international expertise, together with Matsuura's keen ear for the local market and drive to create an exclusively dance-oriented business, would make the Avex team a winner. Matsuura was free to choose the music he liked, while the older man set-up deals with exporters in the U.S., the U.K. and other European countries. Business grew steadily, and Avex-imported "Eurobeat"--that glitzy, high-energy pop so popular on the Continent--was soon in demand by stores.

By 1990, Matsuura wanted more action. Avex was doing little more than buying CDs overseas and distributing them to Japanese retailers. He decided that the next logical step was for Avex to establish its own label. He turned for advice to Yoda, who answered him with a question: "As long as we keep doing imports, we'll do well," Yoda says he told Matsuura. "And you'll be in charge of your own company. But if we make Avex a label, I'm sure it's going to be a very successful, very big company. You'll lose control over managing the business. You have to be prepared for that. Which will you take?"

Suzuki and Matsuura--then company president and managing director respectively--didn't need long to think about it. They took the plunge. "I wasn't afraid," says the still boyish-looking Matsuura. "I was young. There was no reason to hesitate."

Avex opened a recording studio, and Yoda began approaching overseas labels about licensing deals. Meanwhile, Matsuura approached Italian dance-specialty label AEC about pressing a compilation CD exclusively for Avex. The album, titled Super Eurobeat Vol. 9, hit the stores in November 1990, establishing Avex as Japan's only specialty dance label.

With Yoda's appointment to director the following year, the corporation continued to pick up steam. Not only were discos everywhere now throbbing with the high-energy pulses of Eurobeat, but the entire dance phenomenon was developing a unique identity. Two years after the release of the first Avex CD, the entire scene exploded.

YOUNG, RICH AND defiantly sexual, they were girls who didn't want boyfriends, had no thoughts of marriage, lived at home with their parents and spent their money on themselves. In the early 1990s, the hedonistic single-girl became one of the nation's biggest media phenomena. Her holy shrine was, of course, Juliana's; the massive hi-tech disco that opened in February, 1992, in Shibaura, near Tokyo Bay. There she could lose herself--gyrating to deafening techno music while brandishing her costume and crotch at the hordes of sweaty-faced men who stood impotently under her, gawking skyward from below the elevated walkways on which she danced. There was nowhere like Juliana's.

Matsuura's keenly developed street-sense told him that Juliana's presented an unmissable opportunity to get in on the boom from the ground-floor. Avex approached Juliana's promoter Wembley Japan--a joint venture between British leisure facilities operator Wembley PLC and the huge trading company Nissho Iwai--with a proposal: they would produce a series of Juliana's dance compilation albums, each copy of which would include an admission pass to the disco. It was a simple plan, and devastatingly effective for Avex; over the next two years, the label released 13 Juliana's CDs, which sold a total of 2.5 million copies. And thanks to Avex's distribution network, Juliana's fame spread to the furthest backwoods of the nation.

The Juliana's style--over-the-top, flash and a bit sleazy around the edges--helped set the tone for the Avex catalog. To many people, the label and the disco were synonymous. But when Juliana's shut its doors suddenly in August 1994--ostensibly because of a slump in business caused by moralistic neighbors forcing the club to tone down its act, Avex's earnings barely dipped. In fact, the company soared even higher, thanks, again, to Matsuura's eye for trends. In 1992, he had scouted the wunderkind composer, computer programmer, performer and producer Tetsuya Komuro. Matsuura had first approached Komuro when the musician was still a member of the popular Epic/Sony act TMN, and together they had worked on a moderately successful album of English-language versions of TMN hits. Then Komuro left the band for what was to be a phenomenally profitable solo career.

"I'm a vampire," says the gaunt young Komuro, seated in his luxurious, four-penthouse sprawl above Shibaura on Tokyo Bay. When the lights go down on this industrial part of town, Komuro gets to work, poring over his exotic imported keyboard and mixing desk (combined value: Y1.5 billion) until the morning sun sends him to bed. He admits that he likes the "inorganic" feel of his neighborhood at night, when the streets are virtually devoid of human life. Clubs and discos make Komuro nervous, so he rarely goes out. "When I hear club music I feel as if I have to go home," he says, "and make more new sounds." Komuro's commercial music skills are staggering; in 1994, he penned and produced three of the nation's top-10 singles, notching sales of over 4 million.

When Matsuura approached the "vampire" in 1992, Komuro recognized the opportunity to create a new pop-music vehicle combining karaoke and dance. "With karaoke, you only sing, and at a disco, you only dance," he explains. "I thought: `Wouldn't it be fun if the two biggest forms of youth entertainment could be mixed?'" Avex, Komuro felt, would be the ideal partner for the dance-oriented pop group that he was then trying to set up; trf, or Tetsuya Rave Factory.

The Avex-Komuro deal was a musical marriage made in heaven. trf's first album, EZ Do Dance, was an instant hit and established Avex as a bona fide record company instead of a mere repackager of material licensed from overseas suppliers. The album determined the formula for the many subsequent trf releases: an energetic vocal by singer Yuki, a catchy chorus that sticks to the mind like Krazy Glue and an unremitting techno-style rhythm track, all shaken and stirred into a glossy, "busy" mix that's instantly identifiable. Typically, Komuro writes all the words and music for trf releases, as well as taking care of synthesizer programming, "manipulation" and performance. His control over the group is said to be so strong that he chooses the trf wardrobe, even down to their hairstyles. With staggering sales of over 16 million units for the nine albums and 10 singles released so far, some critics have accused Avex of flooding the market with trf product before the group inevitably burns out. Yoda, of course, denies this.

"All the trf singles we've released have been big smash hits, so it seems like a lot," he says. Nevertheless, the figures prove how the trf machine has stormed juvenile imaginations across the country.

Once trf had been established, there was no looking back for Avex. The money was pouring in. More and more employees were hired to handle the burgeoning business. The company moved to a posh Minami Aoyama address. Staffers were given bonuses equivalent to nine months' pay. A one-man New York office was set up. And Yoda ensured that Avex had a very visible profile.

As the company prospered, Yoda played an increasingly active role, making a splash at international music-biz confabs like MIDEM in Cannes, where he flew in mass quantities of sushi and saké for the company's conference parties. It was the midst of Japan's worst recession since the war, but for Tom Yoda and Avex, the big-spending had only begun.

There were men, too, standing in the bleachers, dressed in loud suits and waving their regulation tasseled fans while staring longingly at the women projected on the enormous video monitors. Yoda had spared little expense on his latest strategy.

But if the emperor was spending big in order to boost the Avex profile, he was laying out even more in the name of expansion. In June 1993, Avex launched its first foreign releases: two four-track mini-albums which were licensed to New York-based Radical Records. And in spring the following year, shortly before its second Tokyo Dome extravaganza, Avex scored a major coup by landing the Japan licensing rights for "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," a one-off project by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, at a reported cost of $200,000.

In interviews, the chairman constantly stressed that Avex was more than just a record label: it was a "group," whose different companies would work together synergistically. By 1993, Avex's operations had grown to include music publishing, T-shirts and accessories, computer system design and concert promotion. Next on the agenda was the creation of two more subsidiaries: Velfarre Corp., to oversee operations of the monolithic disco about to be built in Roppongi, and Cutting Edge Inc., a new label that was aimed at the trendy, "independent," or "underground" market. And as business boomed, Avex's promotional budgets reached astronomical heights.

Yoda refuses to divulge how much Avex spends on promotion: "It's confidential and very substantial," he says. "I think that what we spend on advertising is more than many labels' total annual revenue."

"I think their theory is that to maintain the business and the volume you've just got to spend high," says one industry source. "It's obviously been a highly effective technique for them." The problem, he continues, is just how long that strategy can work.

"Maybe Yoda's theory is that if he keeps this high expenditure up, he can shut out the rest of the music industry from the dance field."

But this hasn't stopped other labels from sniffing at the dance-boom door. Industry leader Sony Records in summer 1994 became the first company to challenge Avex with a project called G's Factory, concentrating on dance music licensed from overseas labels. G's Factory's A&R director Miwa Shimura denies that her label is little more than an Avex clone. She does, however, admit that her company jumped to counter the threat of an Avex monopoly.

"Avex's timing was very good, and there's a lot we can learn from them," she says. "But we're not going to copy. We saw the market growing, and we didn't want to miss our last good chance to get into it."

Sony is pushing the atmospheric, spacy branch of club music commonly known as "ambient house/trance," a genre that Avex has deliberately neglected--reportedly because of its associations with mind-altering substances (according to Yoda, young Japanese "don't do drugs"). Chances are good, however, that major labels have missed the bus for success in the mainstream dance market, for Yoda shook the industry up again at the end of 1994 when, with massive fanfare, he opened Velfarre, Avex's lavish, Y3 billion disco in the heart of Roppongi. Reflecting Yoda's cool efficiency and the heat of the business he runs, Velfarre has it all: bristling technology, raving, Juliana's-type clientele and first-class service. It is probably the only disco in Tokyo--or anywhere, for that matter--that is equipped with a traditional tea-ceremony room.

The old-school record companies have found it increasingly difficult to write the new dance label off as a mere flash-in-the-pan. The industry resounded with even more shockwaves when Harry Kaneko, general manager for corporate development at leading record company Pony Canyon, was installed as general manager of the Avex Group's international division, effectively the number-two position in the Avex hierarchy.

Yoda also lured away Haji Taniguchi, a former business affairs manager at Sony Music publishing, and made him assistant to the chairman and manager of international business affairs. Not surprisingly, word on the street is that Yoda offered his prospective executives salaries that were simply too good to refuse.

Meanwhile, still waving his rather thick checkbook, Yoda was signing an eclectic--some might say arbitrary--grab-bag of foreign acts: 10cc, Bananarama, U.S. singer Cheryl Lynn, British singer Jaki Graham and Earth, Wind & Fire, all for the Far East and/or Japan. While critics may argue that some of these acts have seen better days, Yoda maintains that in the long-run, they will all be suitably "Avex-ised." "Their first album for Avex may be done in their old style," says Yoda. "But on their second album, they get into the Avex sound."

Indeed, Yoda harbors a grandiose vision--the notion that a roster of artists as diverse as Avex's new signings will ever share a commonly identifiable sound is imaginative, to say the least. Yet Avex is a young company, and working in ways that often befuddle the older record labels. Unlike them, for example, Avex wastes little time or money cultivating its artists. Tetsuya Komuro, the master of "just-in-time" hit-making, has never signed exclusively with Avex, and churns all his monster hits out on a case-by-case basis. It is a fine agreement for both Avex and Komuro, who has since started his own label, Orumok. But with other artists, Avex has had to learn the hard way. A contract that was signed recently with American rapper Kam is a case in point.

"A U.S. judge would have thrown it out of court because it was so one-sided," says Mark Herrick, a lawyer at the Tokyo-based law firm Anderson Mori. "They could choose how many songs he did. They could assign whatever music they wanted. If he did any conduct they didn't like, they could cancel the contract. They got all the music publishing. . . . We renegotiated it and made it a little more balanced--because they really wanted Kam." Taniguchi, meanwhile, asserts that the rapper is now happy, pointing to the fact that he has extended his Avex contract. Kam was unavailable for comment.

On the domestic front, Avex has bolstered its inexorable march for legitimate acceptance with its successful development of new pop artists such as Japanese rapper m.c.A.T., idol-type singer Hitomi (a Komuro protégé) and the Komuro-produced TV comedian Masatoshi Hamada, who has notched sales of almost two million with a "jungle"-style single called "Wow War Tonight."

"The aim of the offering is not to raise money," Yoda says, "but to help organize Avex into a company suitable for public investment. Our goal is to become a world-class company with a better management structure."

But this doesn't mean that Avex is mellowing. True to its big-spending reputation, the Avex Rave for this year kicked off in August in Osaka before moving to Velfarre for six nights, then finishing up at the 45,000-seat Bayside Square Stadium near Disneyland. The concert involved more than 140 artists from Japan and overseas and was broadcast throughout Asia on Hong Kong-based Star TV.

But the big question remains: Can Avex last? Yoda refuses to discuss the profitability of his company, which, while almost doubling its revenue over last year's figures, continues to burn up an astonishing sum of money for promotion. The president remains confident about the future of dance music in Japan. He is as pragmatic about his product as a housewife hunting down a bargain.

"Dance music is like a red snapper," he says. "If I buy a good-sized fish, I chop off the head and cut it in half. One half is for grilling and one is for steaming. The rest of the fish can be sashimi, sushi, grilled or boiled. The bones can make broth. The tail and fins can be boiled with soy sauce and vegetables. There are many ways of cooking it. In the same way, we can find new ways of cooking dance music."

While assuming that people will still hunger for the same fish, the crucial factor in Avex's longevity, say industry sources, is how much power the emperor will give to his "head chefs" like Kaneko, who besides being well-liked, has a breadth of music-business experience few executives in Japan can match.

"I don't think Yoda has that experience; Harry does," says one source. "Whether or not he's able to utilize it is another matter." Notes another industry insider: "Avex's mainstream music is on the crest of a fad. Obviously they're trying very hard with Cutting Edge to develop an alternative stream of repertoire."

Ultimately, of course, the story behind the rise of Avex--like that of most major pop labels--has little to do with music itself. It has to do with marketing flair and the knack of catching a passing wave and surfing it for all it's worth; something at which Yoda and Matsuura are clearly adept. And, of course, laying out the money to do it. As a Tokyo-based music promoter told 10cc when they consulted him about their offer from Avex: "If they can pay you that much money . . . take it!"