Pioneer DJ Europe : Kei Aikawa Interview

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“We hope to inspire and entertain people around the world.”

KEI AIKAWA

Managing Director, Pioneer DJ Europe

Tell us how you first got into the audio industry? I joined Pioneer Corporation, Japan in 1998 and, since then, I’ve always been involved in the business development of professional markets overseas, such as DJ, audio and visual. We entered the professional audio industry in 2013 with our GSWAVE AND XY Series while I was working at Pioneer Europe.

You’ve recently been made MD of Pioneer DJ Europe, which includes Pioneer Pro Audio, what position did you have before and how did the promotion come about? When our DJ/Pro Audio division was carved out from Pioneer Corporation in March of 2015, we established a new company in Europe - Pioneer DJ Europe - a fully dedicated DJ / professional audio company for EMEA. At that point I was appointed as director with my colleague Mark Drury appointed as Managing Director. At the end of April 2018, after many years of working at Pioneer Europe and Pioneer DJ Europe, Mark decided to retire and I was appointed to replace him and take on this new challenge.

What does your new day-to-day role involve? To be honest, every day is different and covers a wide range of tasks. From discussing planning strategy on conference calls with colleagues in the US and Yokohama to meeting suppliers, it’s a demanding schedule and it certainly keeps me busy!

Pioneer Pro Audio was launched in 2013, a collaboration between Pioneer and Gary Stewart Audio, how has the brand developed over five years? Yes, indeed, we formed a collaboration with Gary Stewart and this helped a great deal in the early days. As the brand evolved with positive feedback

from our XY Series range, we knew we had a great product on our hands, so we shifted the focus to increase the number of products within this range, offering our partners a wide choice to fit many application types. Just having a great product range doesn’t mean the brand will be successful of course, so the next focus for us was to ensure we offer full support to our partners. This involved our technical team designing acoustic models and system specification. In turn, this helped ease the minds of our installers who had little knowledge of the XY product and how it would perform in the early stages. The concept we all agreed on from day one was to hand-select the best audio partners - those who were willing to grow with the brand. We wanted partners that can provide good service to venue owners and set up the system correctly. As an evolving brand, our aim is to have a great product and partners who believe and have the same focus.

The brand is renowned in the club world, but is it looking to be prominent in other markets too, if so, which ones and how do you plan to infiltrate the market? We hope to inspire and entertain people around the world and extend the immersive experience of Pioneer Pro Audio sound beyond the club scene to every walk of audio life. From music festivals to hospitality, education and houses of worship, Pioneer Pro Audio has a solution and we are making strong progress as more and more customers learn about the qualities of what we have to offer.

Geographically, which are the most important territories for Pioneer Pro Audio? As a brand that’s growing, we obviously try to identify key areas to target. Ideally, however, we would like to have a presence in every territory across the globe. For now, our team is responsible for and focusing on the EMEA market and trying to ensure we get it right here. At the moment, the

majority of the business has been achieved within Europe so I think it’s safe to say we are slowly getting there.

Which project is the most iconic for the brand? All our projects make an impact on the growth of the business so it’s impossible to isolate just one. From a small club in Italy to a bar in Amsterdam and renowned clubs and festivals in the US and, across Europe, the Pioneer Pro Audio brand is delivering excellence across a wide variety of settings.

Tell us something we don’t know - that might be surprising - about Pioneer Pro Audio? It might not be widely known that the foundations of the Pioneer Pro Audio range we see today can be traced as far back as the mid 1970s, with the development of Technical Audio Devices. This was a professional speaker brand developed by The Pioneer Corporation as a project to produce high-end speakers with an eye on future audio developments, that ultimately found its way into places like Air Studios in London and George Lucas’s post-production facilities. It is this rich heritage of professional audio that remains in the DNA of every Pioneer Pro Audio product.

What is your desert island disc? The Beatles - The White Album.

If you weren’t in the professional audio industry, what would you be doing? As clichéd as it may sound, I began working here some time ago, it was the first company that gave me the opportunity after I finished university and I definitely feel a sense of loyalty to the brand for helping me find my feet in the early stages of my career. With Pioneer DJ, I’ve had the chance to live in LA and London and meet people from all walks of life, so I can’t imagine what else I’d be doing!

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