hiroki

up, hundreds of cds still up for grabs

LOL. can you gaze into your crystal ball and predict the next few bands of this style where members are gonna fuck up and cause the band to break up? i'm dying for you to enlighten me.

not bad, i'm still more biased towards 未完成レプリカ but this is still nice. love sena's voice and the mood it evokes.

what i did was to buy everything, extract the 5 songs that sound like Ray°C, and delete everything else pretending they don't exist

After next week a small selection of the CDs i'm selling will be shifted to Japan and shipped from there. If anyone's interested in any item highlighted in yellow and want to combine them with other CDs pls PM me by Sunday

HAKLO new mini album "This is HAKLO." (6 tracks, 2000 yen) will be released on 2018.08.26.

🦁🦁🦁🦁🦁

アンフィル(Anfiel) new album "COUNT DOWN" will be released in November

Updated with estimated shipping rates

10% OFF for purchases > $20 Hello. I'm selling a small part of my collection cos I ran out of space... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ql4NK16WUMrYy3H_wwn8NVXbTC2r3F96XOfmJIqI6n0/edit#gid=0 - Listed prices in USD but I also accept the equivalent in JPY. Buyer pays shipping + paypal fees (30 cents + 4.4%). - All CDs are in good-excellent condition and stored in clear plastic wraps. All obis are intact for CDs that originally have one. Damaged cases have been replaced with new ones. - I ship worldwide but pls note that if you live outside of Asia, shipping can get pricey (see below) - If you need pics for specific CDs, just ask. International shipping rates: Proof that I own them:

SHeepSLeep will disband after their oneman live on 2018/09/10

vistlip just announced at their 11th anniversary live at Zepp Tokyo that they will be releasing a full album in Nov

Look: i think the vocalist is irodori's takeru, bassist is log's yuuki and drummer is lydiar's junya. not sure about their guitarist...

Ba.みゆ(miyu) will depart from i.Rias after their one-man live on 2018/9/14

Ryohei will retire after their last live.

Purple Stone new single "飛んで火にいる恋する夏の虫 (tonde hi ni iru koisuru natsu no mushi)" (3 types) will be released on 2018.08.22 http://purplestone.jp/discography.html#7thsingle

i didnt realize someone compiled the numbers for the entire year so thanks for posting this! i just wanted to add that these numbers refer to the first week sales and aren't the total copies sold for individual releases

vistlip will release a new single "BLACK MATRIX" on 2018/08/29

love it, they're my new favorites haha

i think the so-called "promotion" is exaggerated because (i) most of the supposed promotion we do (esp in the form of piracy *cough*) does almost nothing for the target market segment of the bands, i.e. people who can and will go to their lives; (ii) as @Komorebi has mentioned, most of us would be like OMGZ THIS BAND IS GOOD and proceed to recline deeper into our armchair waiting for someone else to upload the band's next release. maybe this sounds a little harsh, but it's supremely arrogant of us to think that the band is obliged to go out of their way to cater to the convenience of international fans when they have literally nothing to gain other than "international exposure"--which in most cases is little more than the comfort offered by the thought that there are now 10 more people outside Japan listening to their music and typing 'awwww they were good' in a forum somewhere when they are on the brink of disbandment. no one's blaming oversea fans for poor sales so much as they are pointing out that in making venue-limited music readily available (through streaming or mail order), the band exacts a potentially high price on the revenue from lives and buppan sales, which is their main, if not exclusive, source of profit. let's bear in mind that most indie bands in fact make only enough copies of CDs to offset the production costs involved, and selling 1 CD at buppan is roughly equivalent to having to sell 2 CDs through VK CD shops, which is why small bands usually start off with live-limited cds before having shops carry their music a few releases later when they don't need the live proceeds that desperately. obviously one could complain about the questionable efficiency of a CD-based industry today (as opposed to one based in digital distribution), but that's a different conversation and the scope of that problem exceeds the specificity of vk. if i'm a bandman doing the cost-benefit analysis in view of existing structural constraints, i would have done the exact same thing. i'm far from loaded and would prefer it if i didn't have to stalk auctions for a year before paying 20k yen for a CD that was handed out for free. but it's easier to take it less personally if we actually remember that the bands aren't charity organizations whose raison d'etre is to hand out their music to as many people as possible even if it's financially unsustainable. for me, at the end of the day it all comes down to judging how much time/effort/money i'm willing to commit to seeking out these rare CDs, and as with everything there's a point beyond which it's just not worth it anymore. (this is also easier to accept if we realize that a lot of japanese fans, too, have to make huge sacrifices time- and money-wise to get the stuff they want.) there are 2 concessions i'll make though. the first: where it gets annoying and unacceptable to me is when bands deliberately make it absurdly difficult for fans who can/will attend their lives to get releases, by coming up with tricks like 'assemble ticket stubs for 3 lives in our tour and present them at the tour final buppan for a special CD.' i get tetchy when bands try to milk fans who are already doing all they can to support the band. the other is the open question of whether it's conceptually possible to make live limited CDs available to international fans while not hurting their live/buppan sales. BLESSCODE tried something like that when they sold Eau de toilette and Bizarre on the Vstar webshop and made it such that only international fans were allowed to purchase them online. But this plainly isn't feasible for bands who lack the relevant connections and I can't see bandmen who aren't as insanely enthusiastic as masaya about making it "fair" for everyone to get their music putting in half that much effort. It's also depressing that for a band who was at least somewhat known in the international vk fandom, they didn't even manage to sell THAT many extra copies - which makes one wonder if it's even worth all the logistical hassle at all.

DOG. IS. BACK. edit: also loving the music wheeee