Biopanda

Well damn :/ I kinda expected this would be coming though, since there haven't been any updates at all from the band in a looooong time :<

Another Euro tour? Yawn. Let me know when Japan remembers that the United States exists.

No-name band joins no-name label. News at 11.

Great article, I think this sums it up a lot better than any of us could I guess VK suffers additionally though... I mean it's marketed towards teenage girls and, well, last time I checked, 14-year-old girls don't have a ton of disposable income from their full-time jobs. It's a bit unrealistic to expect them to spend a ton of money when it's outside of a concert.

As for them being expensive, Japan IS just a really expensive country in general. As anyone who has ever tried to buy fruit there :'D As for why CDs are expensive though, I believe it's a number of factors. First of all being that they are priced for Japanese consumption and obviously not taking any foreign currencies into account. Also(this could probably be explained a lot better) there is a law there that was enacted quite a while ago which allows the copyright owner to sell things at whatever price they want and sellers are not allowed to discount this price(this is why the prices are printed right on the CD itself and in the right stores you can find 10+ year old CDs being sold at the original price). I don't think I need to tell you that a company that can force a price and know that people will pay said price will charge the absolute most that they can. There's also a HUGE rental market for CDs in Japan which I don't think exists anywhere else. This allows people to rent and listen(and rip, most likely) the CDs that they want, so to make up for this, the prices of CDs have been driven up.

I guess the best way to think of it would be that without any downloads there would be a total of like 5 international VK fans as the only ones who would ever know about it would be those who were in Japan and stumbled upon it. So even if 100 people download a CD from some tiny VK band where only 1-5 people actually bought the CD, that's still a net gain of 1-5 sales where there would be 0 otherwise. Especially for Japanese bands, I think downloading is an important tool to enable international touring. How many people would really be willing to throw down $30 for a ticket to go see a band they've never heard of in a music scene that they've never heard of? Now that being said, I still support legal methods of getting music when and where you can, but some effort does need to be put in by the bands as well. I don't think it should really be expected of us as fans to have to jump through hoops just to be able to support our favorite artists, especially in today's world which is so global and digital. Yet there the bands are, sometimes outright denying international fans when they sell things through mail-order because Japanese people are apparently terrified of writing non-Japanese addresses and generally refuse to send things overseas.

I guess each person is different? I tend to buy digital copies if they're available just due to the price differences alone. I want to say that when I bought the last Magistina Saga cd, a digital copy cost me like... $7? Buying a physical copy probably would have ran me around $30+ after shipping. Also, it's not like digital copies don't exist... there's plenty on itunes japan, but also mora.jp and listen.jp are huge for digital distribution. All three of those block you from purchasing if you don't live in Japan though, and one of them(listen.jp) even used to allow foreign purchases, but recently blocked them. Even if they wouldn't see many purchases, blocking them off like that is just guaranteeing that anyone who would have possibly bought it would most likely revert to piracy instead.

原色少年 songs? Drooling.

Any shopping service should be fine, I'd assume. I use FromJapan all the time to do mail-order purchases from sites like that, so someone like them should work just fine.

I think a decent portion of that could be alleviated by them embracing the digital age though. With as prevalent as itunes and other digital music venues are, they are sorely underused by the Japanese market(especially VK bands), and when they do, they specifically lock out their foreign audience from giving them money most of the time. I think many western acts have already figured out that digital is the way to go(at least parallel with physical-media releases) just because that is how most people listen to their music nowadays. Of course it wouldn't get rid of downloading(nothing ever will, no matter what they try), they might as well at least try an capitalize on some of that. Personally, if a release I'm interested in is available on the US itunes store, then I don't mind tossing a few dollars their way even if it's already been uploaded here. As for the main point of this thread, I think blogspots should be doing neither, honestly. I mean, 99% of VK blogspots serve absolutely NO purpose at all. I can make an exception for ones like Evil en Lucifer because they focused on posting old stuff and most, if not all, of their posts were original and not just reposts. The other blogs, however? All they do is steal possible users from here. There's absolutely nothing that people couldn't get just as easily by spending the 20 seconds and registering for an account here.

I guess they could no longer ride on the fact that Europeans were the only people who cared about them :'(

How incredibly stupid. I wish they'd just put them on one cd and charge a normal amount, but I guess Kiwamu has to line his wallet one way or another.

Whelp. Guess there goes one release off the list of things I'd probably buy :'D

4500 yen for a minialbum @_@ I hope that's the wrong price or something.

:'(

Sweet! Didn't think I'd ever get a chance to hear those cds since they were ridiculously limited.

They're the newest band of Vo.HERO(ex.plu'to/P*Route/GAM/Grigori/Urb Shade Black boot's).

I hope this is actually sold in stores unlike their first single :<

http://netoff.co.jp/index.jsp It's the online branch of bookoff and is like 99% non-vk CDs XD

Oh, well there's sadly not much online by those bands but here's what there is Neverland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyc47Pi5P-Q The Sherry: Oh and 【MU:】 was pretty awesome the few times I saw them as well

1:27 == my reaction during his whole song. Bro can't sing to save his life