FujiTV bans lip-synching in its music programmes

FujiTV announced recently that it will ban singers from lip-synching in its music programmes i.e. MUSIC FAIR, Bokura no Ongaku and Doumoto Kyoudai. The news was first made known when Kikuchi Shin, the producer of these music programmes, mentioned on his blog entry dated 5 March that the TV station and crew decided on this during a meeting on 6 February. In this era when viewers are generally forgiving about singers lip-synching, they wish to focus on "live music". Besides, the minimum a singer should be able to do is to sing "live" or else he/she shouldn't be considered as one.

However, views on this issue have been largely divided with those in favour of this move saying things like "if the viewers are listening to lip-synching, they might as well listen to CDs instead of watching the music programmes", "cleaning up the bad practice of lip-synching is good". On the other hand, there were also netizens who would rather hear the pitch-perfect lip-synching performance rather than one which totally destroys the song if the singer is bad at singing live. Some even criticised the practice of music-synching i.e. when bands pretend to play their instruments live while the music is actually being played in the background and said that this should be banned as well. At the same time, some people were also worried about the disappearance of idols in such music programmes if other TV stations follow in FujiTV's footsteps since a lot of the idols aren't exactly known for being able to sing well in live performances.

Source: RBB Today

So what are your views regarding this? Actually, I prefer listening to real "live" performances instead of pitch-perfect lip-synching because that's the beauty of "live" performances. I also think that due credit must be given to those who can sing as well as they sound in their CDs rather than give the impression that everyone can achieve the same thing. There were some instances where I noticed obvious lip-synching (not in Japanese music programmes though) and frankly speaking, it irked me to the max to see that. If the singer had a reason to do that and came clean with it, being sick and not being able to skip the TV appearance, I don't mind listening to lip-synching. However, if you lip-synched and tried to argue your way out of it by giving weird reasons like "the dance was too strenuous so I had no choice but to lip-synch", that's something which I think won't be acceptable.

I can see where FujiTV is coming from especially for programmes like Bokura no Ongaku and Doumoto Kyoudai which features live bands and raw sounds where someone shouldn't be lip-synching at all. However, it surprises me a little to see that if Bokura no Ongaku has to enforce such a ban, that means there were people who went against this rule in the past. Now who did that? (thinking hard) I would have thought that this programme would be different from the other pre-recorded music programmes though given how it emphasizes the beauty of live music. 

I remember reading something in the past saying that Music Station prides itself on its live performances and there was once when the announcer stressed this point after one singer screwed up and it went out "live" to the viewers since there was no way the crew could have concealed that mistake. Given that most music programmes are pre-recorded, it no doubt gives them a bit more leeway in choosing between these two performance modes unlike a live broadcast.