Komorebi

if vk becomes popular in the west, what will i use to scare people away when i don't want them to talk to me

In life? No. On Monochrome Heaven? Sure. You've already made 26 posts; that's larger than the majority of the user base tbh.
 
Posting is the easiest thing you can do. You want to see topics about your favorite bands? Make them! Start discussion topics and write reviews. I can't read your mind and do it for you (although I really do try). When you put in genuine effort, you will be surprised by the response that you get. Maybe that response won't be immediate, and that response won't be what you thought it was or in the way you thought it would be, but it will be there. A lot of people lurk on this forum, so eye ball real estate is just as important as text responses. 

Not to sound like a hipster but i usually associate with stuff becoming more popular also becoming more bland and boring (with rare exceptions) so I'm kind of happy with this being as niche and small as it is. Last thing I'd really wanna draw in is crowds that act like kpop or ariana grande fans lol

You have to be the change you want to see.

> please stop stealing and buy more albums
> tfw all your albums are out of stock or on 2-4 week back order
 
Like I get it. Piracy is a net loss leader for DIMLIM. But when all your albums are sold out and you (Retsu, not you) keep bitching about piracy, you look completely unaware to what the real problems plaguing the band are. We can't buy your music even if we wanted to, and I'd love a copy of CHE DO A RA tbh.

The promotion amounts to an eighth baggie of weed being the album cover. I'm pretty sure it'll be loud and dank as fuck.

I don't necessarily mind if they change their sound to something more akin to ONE OK ROCK or whatever, cuz I can appreciate some of that stuff, and I can live without all the boogeyman vocals and pig squeals. I just hope that they go hard and really knock this shit out of the park, whatever it is.
 
That said, the promotion for this album thus far has been utterly unappealing.
 
 

Yeah they should take good care of that laptop with samples.. 🙃

cant stop imagining a timeline where they actually make it abroad but end up having their equipment stolen partway through the 'tour'

The funniest thing about that is Retsu takes himself so seriously he doesn't realise he's actually being hilarious.

Track 8
 
 

Ready, set....

tbh i'm more hyped about this album than DIMLIM's...

Sho is the main reason i continue to pay attention anymore.

Que vergüenza. Pa eso que ni vengan. 

The gig in Chile is going to be terrible, mark my words.

this may be off topic but this topic reminds me of what i always wanted to say about mh.
 
idk what we overseas fans can do to make vk more popular than what it is, but one thing i think doable is to make mh become more popular.
vk may be dead one day but mh should live on after that. personally i always see mh as a very underrated japanese music forum that has high potential to grow bigger.
 
if the stats on similarweb aren't lying, it's very impressive that we have around 1.3m page views monthly (from 200k total visits * 6.6 page views per a visit). what i mean is mh already has a huge user base in hands but the engagements of the content on the forum are a lot less compared to it. for example, we have very few concurrent registered users online as you can see from the image below. it's only ~20 members online. (700 guests are mostly crawlers i believe). i know that it's taken at a random time of a day but usually it's still not significantly more than this either considering we have over 9.6k members registered. additionally, we can have more followers on facebook and twitter from our daily visitors if we want to. (it hurts to see that mh which is the source of almost everything japanese rock related has far less likes than random j-rock pages on facebook even demon android's one.)
 

 
moreover, traditional forum software like IPB is kinda 2000-ish, but i'm just saying. i have nothing against it. IPB is not bad though. it regularly gets updates and bug fixes. but nowadays there are a number of better open source alternatives as well; e.g. discourse and nodebb. converting the database from one to another is such a pain though if we ever do it.
 
sysops are one of the most important roles that almost nobody notices the effort they put behind the scenes. we have had only 3-4 sysops since the inception of mh and now there is only one left. it's a vital position that needs to recruit too. what'd we do if they're all gone? it'd even mean the end of mh. (not sure about how recruiting a new sysop is going, but it seems difficult to get one to begin with.)
 
at the end of the day, staff are all volunteers. finding a suitable staff member who is willing to spend their free time is hard already but finding one who is dedicated to the community is even harder. one day the current staff members will be rotated as well. so we're not going anywhere if we don't expand the user base. we can find more talented people from a bigger one.
 
this is my two cents:
 
it's time for mh 4.0. sooner or later mh has  to change too. otherwise, the community will be gone if we don't do something beforehand. if i were the founder, i'd rebrand "monochrome-heaven" to something else shorter, easier to type and pronounce, and easy to remember esp for non-english natives. having a dash (-) in a domain name looks unprofessional for a brand imo. just like when "thefacebook.com" becoming "facebook.com". the former is not a professional brand name compared to the latter. they bought it once they had the money to afford it and became the "facebook" we know nowadays.
 
rebranding mh may be too much for those who're familiar with the name but it'd be a big step to be known better. by rebranding i mean changing the look of the forum too whether it be a new skin or even new forum software that's more modern. we can still stick with vk just like before and be more open to the general japanese rock scene which is more lively and has a wider fanbase like ruling it all online not only on here but also on other social networks.
 
yeah, i know that it's easier said than done. it takes a lot of effort and is very challenging to accomplish, but knowing the potential mh has not being used is wasting as well.

The gig in Chile is going to be terrible, mark my words.

The gig in Chile is going to be terrible, mark my words.

There was a shift in genre and I’ve noticed most people tend to blend sounds they aren’t emotionally attached to in their minds. 
You might say every BTS song sounds the same while to a fan they all sound completely different. Most 90’s and early bands are totally cookie-cutter to me, it was just a different cookie-cutter. And if you ask me a ton of European epic metal bands sound just like Galneryus xD

I translate for my fandom and no one reads nor cares and tbh it's too much time and effort I've invested over three years with 0 results for the band.
 
VK culture seems to be a huge turnoff for metal fans. I tried to lure a girl who kinda knew about MM and gazette bus is focused in western metal into modern VK and she got hooked on Dadaroma, Diaura and JLK. Lasted a few months and last night threw a tantrum after watching a few lives and claimed she was quitting altogether and when I tried to reason with her her reasons were "yelling encore is so tacky and I just can't with it" and "fandoms expect me to comment nice things on the members accounts and participate in fanprojects". Upon further reasoning as to why join street teams  if she didn't want to engage in fan activities the response was "I wanted drinking buddies". Every other male into metal I've tried to get into VK backs away as soon as they see the aesthetic, right after drawing every comparison possible with any Western act. There's just too much stigma currently around Japan's pop culture for normies to want to step in and a good portion of metalheads are apparently just too closed minded and stay within their own sub-sub-sub genre of metal (I've gotten complaints about bands blending genres and not sticking to one variant of metal) to want to give VK a chance.

What worries me about that is someone on Retsu’s instagram Q&A asked what djent and prog bands does he listen to and he answered “I don’t listen to that music anymore” someone also asked what music does he listen to and he answered “Chillhop”. Part of me thinks DIMLIM are about to head in a massive change in direction with this new album, and I don’t think many of us are gonna receive it well, that’s just my opinion, of course 

As much as we would like that VK worked like western pop in terms of marketing it's never gonna work and it's pretty futile to argue over a what if. That is the reality of Japan's culture and we've seen how reluctant they are to mingle with the west, much less adopt their customs.
As an example, Dobe did it right when engaging with the fans and easily supplying their music to the international fandom and for a while everyone was super vocal about them. Then the second Suica was fired no one was hyping them anymore. Merch or no merch involved,  teens just don't get invested beyond a cute member and/or lyrics that speak about their struggles (hence why they get popular easily among menhera chicks in Japan).
As someone who has co-organized tons of fan projects that require little to no monetary effort, what I've experienced is all those social media fans who talk non-stop about X or Y bandman disappear once you ask them if they want to take 10 minutes to write a message for a fanbook they won't even have to pay for. They generally don't care for any fandom activity beyond hyping looks and that drives away newcomers interested in music.
 
Is there any way for bands to market themselves (while remaining VK) to make people interested enough? I doubt it. Even for popular artists the fans who are a little bit more invested are a lot fewer than the ones who just comment on who was on Taylor's latest videos and leave it at that. Kpop artists do thrive on sales and western ones I'm willing to bet they live off advertisement rather than their music since everyone streams it to the point where music is their platform to jump to some unrelated brand to sponsor them and actually give them cash.
 
I see your points, however I disagree with artist seeming more unattainable. They are FAR more attainable and approachable than any mainstream artist. 
 
I'll agree with you on the elitism part, but not quite regarding sharing rare material.
 
Edit: something else came to mind. Most of the world is pretty casual about listening to music and won't go out of their way to even go to a gig. What makes people care on a deeper level about it? Habit. An early exposure and thus attachment to artists. Some sort of connection and/or the music somehow filling some void (hence why people tend to get harder into bands during their 10's and 20's). I think we can all assume that the more attached we are to an artist (whatever the genre, think about beliebers and directioners) the more fucked up we are somehow. It's been widely debated in other threads the common 'fucked-up-ness' most vk listeners had when encountering it and getting themselves attached to what we all agree is mostly crap we hate to love. That might just be another barrier. The rest of the world just doesn't have that hole in their hearts (mental health) that fits VK perfectly.

I always bite my lip when this comes up in general discussions about rock music because I never want be or sound like the sour adult who's mad that a scene they loved is dying out, but this, from what I observe, is true. I don't know what it is, but rock music doesn't seem to be picking up with the zoomers like it did with previous generations (yes, rock music has always been an alternative scene, but it still had a notable presence both in the charts and in fans). Now add that to the fact that once rock stars like Radke and Barker have implemented hip hop to their work and rock music aesthetics have been adapted by rappers and other pop music musicians, and it feels like our presence is nearing irrelevancy further than ever. 
 
It's also a hard yes to what you mentioned about how what would have been the present-day vk western fandom is now just another part of the kpop fandom and that point hits an emotional string in me because it was that realization that first made me notice how a taste for rock music seems rarer than ever with today's kids. I worked as a substitute teacher when I was in university and got to work around middle schoolers frequently and at some point it dawned on me that all the kids who were really into anime were also really into kpop. If I thought about that crowd in my day , that would have been the crowd where you would find the vk-fan kids (which as mentioned in other comments were in large responsible for the perceived popularity vk had around 2010). Anime is more popular than ever/Japanese fashion is more mainstream in the west than ever, and scene/emo fashion is popular again. All these trends are moving along. What's not being taken with them is rock music. And that hurts like heck to write. All of that being said, I would love to see zoomers make me eat my words and have them experience a proper rock movement of their own. But at the moment, that's just not what I'm seeing. Mind you there are some kids who still like rock music and vk, but their numbers are considerably lower than what we had in the 2000's.

Ah now I see clear. Their masterplan was to step away from VK so that they can‘t be crowned for the worst rollout in VK history. 😂