NICKT

I can't believe 12012 predicted these self-isolating times!
 
 

If anyone's looking for pop and rock oldies (or a few more alternative acts) from mainly the '80s or early '90s, the JPOP80SS Blogspot is highly recommended. All the links are still working as far as I've experienced, and most of the uploads are high quality (sometimes lossless too).
 
As for the underground, the website Church of Zer has tons of (international but also Japanese) hardcore, punk and old-school metal of the extreme variety. This one's a bit more tricky when it comes to active links, but I've had luck most of the time. Very high-quality uploads (all lossless iirc), with some cool vinyl and bootleg rips that are not commonly found elsewhere.

KitajimaToru[nZk]
heh

My money's for a Dir en grey alt where they play their old music without chugging it to pieces. Girugamesh coming back as an alter ego band like they did in the Mucc cover album would be nice too.

This has already been kinda touched upon earlier ITT, but one thing I've noticed within the VK fandom more than within basically ANY of the other music spheres I've dipped my toes into is that a ton of people who get into VK seem to act as if the only bands that exist are the ones that are currently active, and any group that's disbanded/on hiatus/whatever just vanishes into oblivion as soon as the new looks and singles stop popping up. There's this tendency for people to basically treat the scene the same way tons of anime fans treat anime - "if it's not part of the current season then i pretend not to see it". Considering the ridiculous turnover rate that most VK bands themselves tend to have, this can easily lead to situations where people suddenly find themselves left without their faves even within the span of just months. 

I'll suggest one of the many contributing factors for a high turnover rate is because VK is quite a 'gimmick' genre/subculture and generally gimmicks will only keep people entertained for so long, genre's like the new phase of emo music with groups like MCR and glam/hair metal had their time in the sun and spawned huge subcultures but died out as people grew up and got tired of it and I'd consider both of those as gimmick genre's where if you stripped back the clothing and tone of the groups, it wouldn't have had as much excitement around it. I think as people grow older things like the clothing and look of a band don't matter as much but they were certainly one of the elements that drew me in when I was younger and probably what draws in people nowadays.
 
As well as people tiring of the gimmick of VK, I imagine people move over to K-pop because it's easier to find communities and like-minded people both online and in reality, I live in a very small city and work in a slightly larger town, I've maybe met three people that liked Dir En Grey but I've meant countless people that like BTS, Shinee, NCT etc.

I think one of the reasons VK might have such a high turn over rate is that a lot of people who listen to VK seems to listen to VK only. That's not an healthy way to approach an "hobby", and one is bound to get tired of it. It's also hard to follow bands for a long time since the lifespan of a vk band is shorter than average, so that might be turn off for people after a while. 
 
Also the way VK is "marketed" is closer to idol music than it is to """normal""" music, and just like how people stop following idols at some point, the same happens with VK. I dont consider the visual kei > kpop passage to be moving from one thing to another, but moving to a different version of the same thing. 

the forum is living off of its premium member section bro. otherwise it could've been dead already. 
 
I understand where you are coming from because your frame of reference is inherently mainstream pop and rock oriented. There is more music than we could even listen to in our lifetimes that is made non-profit, strictly for the communities they're coming from. There are bands that are even legendary only touring occasionally even if they're not political. I'm opposed to capitalism, I'm opposed to sales. This is just my opinion, but I don't support the economical model of visual kei even though I love its music and history, so I also don't care if it dies out because its economical model was made redundant by the 21st century. If it can adapt to the streaming model then god bless. 
 
 

From my experience it's more like bringing news, shitting on indie newcomers, sass each other out and downloading stuff, so...

I don't mean to fight, but people do this all over the world. Just not in the music you listen to, mate

Tell that to Yuu (ex-Zodia and a bunch of other bands) and his master's degree in mechanical engineering. The whole "high school dropouts that live off their mitsus" stereotype is so outdated. Most indies in this day and age have an education and have day jobs to support themselves, otherwise with what they're making they'd be begging on the streets.
 
You guys really can't help yourselves from being judgemental and sassy for no reason huh?
 
Of course everyone is free to do whatever, uploading and downloading definitely won't stop, but I just wanted to reflect on how this affects the scene, especially for the western fanbase.
 
This may be beating a dead horse for your, but I haven't seen a topic for discussing this, so might as well hearing everyone's opinion in just one place.

Then the majority of their income comes from their job as a physics professor or as a host, I reckon. 
 
This horse has been beaten to death on this forum. When children are starving and people are being droned and shot all over the world with the compliance or the guns of the governments most of us belong to, then even considering to pose downloading music as an ethical question is stupid and embarrassing. There's no reason for anyone here to care, those who download will dl and those who won't won't. I stream bands on spotify when they are there, I bought Anfiel's second album digital because i liked them back then, I wouldn't pay a buck for david if it's able for purchase online because I think they suck, but I'll still dl it to know what it's about — everyone else will continue to do more or less the same unless they have a mental disorder where they live vicariously through their fave bandmen. 

I honestly don't know what there is to gain by white knighting some high school dropouts rockstar dreams in the year 2020. The world is in lockdown, the polar caps are melting; I think if you're making art for profit in this age then you can fuck the right off and get a real job, even if it's visual kei where half of the appeal of this niche comes from the weird economy that sustains it. 
 
 

genuinely convinced at this point these dudes are stored in the same sweatshop where they leave the guys from kiryu in between tours

I am a simple man. I see Kisaki's name, I click to see the comments.
 
 
 
🦋

Sadly the guy is too well established in the VK scene, despite his shitty behavior. Imo it's not just that japan thinks differently of people like him, but guys like him have so much support behind their back they really can get away with a lot of shit. See also Marilyn Manson or Chris Brown. They too did some horrible, abusive shit and still have so many people cheering them on and excusing their acts. 
 
And this is why idolizing people, really any people, in the media and entertainment industry is wrong.

Not really a fan of rap in general (unless it's from before the 2010s) but here are some artists/mvs for those that would like to further explore this genre:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

So this originated in a news post and I didn't want to respond there and then I figured that at one point we spoke about this in a general thread so here we are now.

I've never been physical CD listener of VK, the amount of music I listen to would amount to an insanely large assortment of jewel cases and it just was never a logical decision, especially considering shipping prices and it just became a joke. I started out originally having a collection on my computer and then would put my favourite few songs on my phone and then I upgraded to an MP3 player that housed my entire collection, removing everything off the computer. Though, the small size of this MP3 player and the following iPod forced me to instead of keeping entire albums to just quickly go through, find which songs I liked and then delete the rest.

I started being a shut-in and listening to music on the go wasn't necessary so I started keeping music on my PC again. I now also use Spotify because copying and pasting every new CD to an MP3 player was just excessive hassle and unnecessary wasting of time. 

I stuck with Windows Media Player for way too long before shortly moving to iTunes and now I'm stuck firmly in MusicBee. 

Now, I get the appeal of having CDs and a large physical collection for collection's sake but I can't fathom actually having it that way with function. Maybe I have music playing way too much compared to others or I spend too much time on the computer where my music's stored and easily accessed but having to deal with all the faff in regards to actually playing CDs, going from one artist to another artist or even from one album to another is just easier with a digital library.

With physical media you also don't get tags and metadata. For the past few years I've gotten stupid when it comes to my library and have begun tagging to all hell, trying to make things as organized as it can be. 



This is a screenshot of the first page of tags in MusicBee. If I wanted to listen to rock music then I'd go up to the top and type in rock, voila: automatically get a rock playlist. Release date isn't just by year but now includes month and day in the correct order(Lookin' at you, America) which means when artists are sorted by release then it's actually ordered properly. Composer credits so that if I found a song I liked I can find songs by the same song writer. The grouping section is home to my Visual Kei tag which makes it super easy to isolate just the Visual Kei parts of my collection.



Using both the artist and album artist tags I can have artists sorted alphabetically but still have them displayed with their Japanese names. I originally had both genres and composer/arranger credits listing using commas but that ran into issues when names kept reappearing because if you typed "Writer A, Writer B" and then "Writer B, Writer A" those two whole bands are two separate tags. With the semi-colon it actually stores each one separately.



So each genre will now properly list here isolated instead of being long chains of repeating genres.



This is page two of the Tags, this is Gackt's Ai Senshi, because it covers a lot of the unique tags. Original artist is for covers, it's an original tag for MusicBee and you can see my custom cover tag which I realized was superfluous. The tie-in tags are for when a song is used in a piece of media, it names the media and categorizes it along with it's usage. If you wanted to listen to anime openings then you could just go to the search bar, type in anime opening and voila. The language is self explanatory and it shocks me that it's not used officially. Romaji and translation are just for Japanese songs because I like having an song presented with it's proper title in Japanese characters but for searching it's hard if you don't remember the kanji, etc. I often see people have the song name in english with either the romaji or Japanese title in brackets and it just looks horrible, this way all that information is kept out of the way so you get a clean library but that information is still there if you need it.



This is my main page/layout for MusicBee when I'm using it day-to-day. The artist column is ridiculously wide because I hate how names display when they're longer than the column and you have to account for those stupidly long Visual Kei band names. Underneath the album art you can see it displays relevant information like genre, publisher/label and language along with release date and title of the disc. Composer and arranger credits are also visible to help you see which songs were by who. Here's another example with Dir en grey's GAUZE:



Another interesting thing can be done here using those tie-in tags and also the cover tags. MusicBee and I assume other programs have it too, but you can make automated playlists. The criteria which it can sort and filter by is amazing, so for covers I can just set it to look at the original artist tag and if it's not empty then it'll throw the song into the playlist. Same with the tie-in tag.



MusicBee allows you to have multiple tabs like a browser and in these I have different playlists open and locked, with these tabs you can even change the layout so in my cover tab for instance, I've taken out the composer and arranger credits and instead have the original artist tab displayed and then sorted it by said tab.



The anime tab is similar but instead of original artist I have the series name(which it's then sorted by) and usage displayed. This is great because despite songs for a show being from different artists this way it'll group them together and if you look above at the criteria screenshot there's a partially hidden checkbox that if you click filters out duplicate songs so if you have a song on a single and then the same song on an album it'll only keep one in the playlist.





(I'm a big fan of Gundam.)

So yeah, just the extent of what I can do with my collection digitally will never be even closely met by physical media, outside of novelty I just don't see the value in a physical collection. 

And yes, most of the reason why I posted all this is because I wanted people to see the effort and time I've wasted.

EDIT: Oh, I suppose adding this would be a nice way to cap this off:

''inThe time it took you to make this post we disbanded''

Wow you really aren't messing around when it comes to arranging your music. Funny though because I'm the same with my physicals just in a different way. I have all my stuff arranged in genre then alphabetically, so if I want a VK album, I got a VK section to look through, if I want a death metal album, I got a death metal section to look through and so on for each genre and finding stuff is never a pain because it's alphabetical by band which is then arranged in order of release. 😛 We're music dorks here right? haha.
 
I guess it depends what each person values about their music I suppose, like you mentioned metadata and all that, which personally I don't find any real value in myself. But what I get value from, from physical releases, is having the artwork and all the info such as who was in the band on that recording, the image they had for that era, the lyrics, who the guest musicians were and who produced it etc... this may be coming from me as a musician myself, but the artwork and presentation of the package beside the music is also a very big part of the overall release itself, like it can really express certain atmospheres and messages you may have missed without seeing them, which on the flip side may be good as you can build your own ideas from the images and such it creates for you. But anyhow, I feel that all helps you really understand the music itself and is all pretty much missed by buying digital albums. Guess you can that info can be looked up easily enough though, but yeah is easier for me to have it in just one package. And here comes the main thing I think, which plays a big factor in our differences, is that you have playlists of favourite songs, I often prefer to listen through whole albums at a time, again, the continuity, the themes throughout and such, the atmosphere of each song and the moods it contributes to the listening experience it all comes together as one whole piece rather than a selection of songs, if you get what I mean? So guess just the different way we approach listening to music and how we enjoy it is different so we get different value from it.
 
But talking of value, this is one reason I've never really gotten into digital music because it feels like you're paying for nothing really. I prefer to pay for an item, I can have and keep forever, not store on a computer that will get lost among the billion other albums in there. And in fairness, with digital releases, if you look you can find digital albums to download for free and you end up with the same thing (right?? As I'm not a big downloader myself you may be able to shed some light on the benefits of downloading releases over finding free versions) which is a handful of files on a computer, which to me are worthless, evidenced by the fact you can't really sell digital releases. Physical releases definitely have more monetary value and as for the collectors, some albums have very high values! I have albums myself that would go for over £100, and my mate has an album that typically is valued around £250 online.... So clearly there is a much higher value placed on the physical package than a handful of WAVs or whatever. But again a lot of people probably aren't bothered about that kind of thing these days.

Everyone here bemoaning digital releases makes me wonder how you consume music. 

I have a couple music cds but I literally have not listened to non-digital music since the mid 2000s. Spotify for when I'm out and about and when I'm at home I've got my thousands and thousands of songs on my computer, can't imagine sitting there and being like "Hey I wanna listen to music" and then staring at a stack of jewel cases whilst I figure out what I want to listen to. So much ease and comfort with my digital library and can't even begin to imagine going back to physical.

Everyone here bemoaning digital releases makes me wonder how you consume music. 

I have a couple music cds but I literally have not listened to non-digital music since the mid 2000s. Spotify for when I'm out and about and when I'm at home I've got my thousands and thousands of songs on my computer, can't imagine sitting there and being like "Hey I wanna listen to music" and then staring at a stack of jewel cases whilst I figure out what I want to listen to. So much ease and comfort with my digital library and can't even begin to imagine going back to physical.

Everyone here bemoaning digital releases makes me wonder how you consume music. 

I have a couple music cds but I literally have not listened to non-digital music since the mid 2000s. Spotify for when I'm out and about and when I'm at home I've got my thousands and thousands of songs on my computer, can't imagine sitting there and being like "Hey I wanna listen to music" and then staring at a stack of jewel cases whilst I figure out what I want to listen to. So much ease and comfort with my digital library and can't even begin to imagine going back to physical.

B's used in Japanese to replace the letter V, so you could read that as cock lovin'.

Which I recommend.

Yeah, kinda messy, but we urgently need someone in that weird band who openly acknowledges their VK stuff is quintessential for their project and the whole Japanese rock scene altogether. #GauzeToo