This is the second part of a special reflective entry on Japanese musicians (J-pop/J-rock) offered on the Itunes music service. Again, it’s not necessarily a reflection for or against the service specifically, but it’s more or less something that all of you could use and note if you want to support your favorite artists.
I’m a fan of both Oblivion Dust and L’arc~en~Ciel for example. Imagine my surprise when I found a few albums by both artists added to the long list of J-musicians featured on the service. “Kiss”, Laraku’s latest album, is now up for download on Itunes as well as “Dune”. (Now all they have to do is add more Monoral, Fake? among other bands, and then we’re talking, haha). Namie Amuro’s “Play” and single for “Baby Don’t Cry” were also added to the growing archive to my pleasant surprise. It shows that more accessible songs are readily growing and that even some of you have responded in terms of supporting your favorite artists, but it will take more in order for more obscure and underappreciated artists in the J-music spectrum to be added to the Itunes catalog, so I encourage, if you haven’t already done so, to speak out about what artists you want added to Itunes (you can even use my entry as a referential list of some of the artists you’d like to see on Itunes-I know I could make a personal list of 10 artists right off the bat).
I decided that I wanted to use this as a reference point for those of you who are looking for artists on Itunes (also for myself since I’m always looking for new artists to listen to-even outside the J-music spectrum) and for those of you who really do want to know when they update and what artists, specifically, they update, because Itunes doesn’t really have a notification system regarding when they add specific Japanese artists to their growing repetoire, aside from when it falls under the World releases or if you have purchased that artist before under the “My Alerts” tab. If you want to use it, feel free, I’m going to add tags to this post as it grows and refer to it if other artists surface.
Updated: A lot of J-artists have been removed from Itunes, but that’s also meant that a few who haven’t been offered in the past have been added. One thing I will say is that if one of your favorite artists was removed (Itunes, why the devil did you take down Ami Suzuki – I was just going to buy her album “Supreme Show” when you took it down?!!!!!!!! It wasn’t even up for 2-3 weeks!!!!!![end rant]), send requests to Itunes and encourage the people you know to support them by buying their songs from the service. This would help a lot in terms of the international market breaking into the American market, and I’d love it if Itunes ended up taking the barriers of only offering select artists on their service from other countries and just allowing more of an open selection of music in totality.
I’m going to try to update this a bit more, because it hasn’t been updated since November of 2008 and there have been a lot of popular artists that were once available that are now removed, while others have been added. I’m not sure why for the removals (lack of sales, expenses, etc.), but I do find it unfortunate and I hope that they could offer more to offer for those of us who can’t purchase from import (or just can’t shop for music in general because of limited accessibility – in my own personal case, that’s the truth) in the future.








