Forum - View topicJ-pop Previews?
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obelix1983
Posts: 6 Location: mostly Connecticut... Sometimes France |
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I love J-pop but I want to get a feel for the bands before I invest $23 or so on their CDs.. any one have a site to help me out with this? Please?
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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Just look up the artist you're intrested, and find their official site. Every J-pop artist site I've been to has free streams of their songs and CDs.
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Dilandau
 Posts: 525 Location: Tea House |
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Tofu Records (Sony) was begun to release Domestic version of some Japanese music. They have snipets and such at their site too:
Tofu[/url] |
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holl.e.rama
Posts: 102 Location: California |
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Ooh! I love J-pop and know some stuff about it. I could give you suggestions if you say what kind of music you like, but otherwise, I would suggest checking out the artists' sites. Also, if you buy import CDs from yesasia.com, occasionally they won't be as expensive. I've found that many of the Chinese and Korean CDs aren't that expensive (the average price for a BoA CD is about 11, which really surprised me!) and the FIR CD I was looking at was only $14. Of course, afterwords I looked for a S.H.E CD and those were a lot more
 Anyway, the ioverseas editions are all $18. A lot of the more popular artists have overseas editions, artists like Ayumi Hamasaki, Gackt, Do As Infinity, etc. But yeah, like someone was saying, a division of Sony records, Tofu records is releasing American editions of Japanese CDs. They don't have too many artists, but the people they have CDs for are: TM Revolution (definately recommended, he did the ending "Heart of Sword" for Kenshin, btw), X-Japan (I haven't listened to so much of their stuff, I'm not the biggest Visual Kei fan), Nami Tamaki (I love her! She's very poppy though, just a warning), and L'Arc~en~Ciel (omigosh! When I heard they were releasing Smile! I almost screamed! I love, love, love Laraku! Get it, get it get it!). Also, Tofu records has a CD called J-Pop CD which isn't too bad, it's ugly, but I like the songs on it. Also they have Neosoul which is a J-Pop collection as well, but it's more J-Urban. I don't really like RnB, but whatever, if you like it, then you can listen to it. Also, Puffy AmiYumi has two American releases through another record company. They do the theme song for Teen Titans, though most of their stuff is a bit more toned down. (I really like their newest single, Sunrise, that's not available in the US though...) Wow, I'm talking too much...Anyway, J-Music definately varies a loooot so if you have any questions, feel free to ask me!
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Arachne666
 Posts: 7 |
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. Unless you're actually buying CDs released by Chinese or Korean artists, don't buy indescriminately from those countries. There are official general Asian editions and Taiwanese editions of most CDs, but most of the time, if it's from China (Hong Kong in particular) it's probably not official. Watch out for SonMay and Ever Anime (if you're a Gravi fan, you should already know this, since those companies seem to specialize in bootlegged Gravi CDs). But as with any rule, there are exceptions, so it's best to just take CDs and the like case by case.
As far as where to buy, where to get samples, that's not too difficult a problem to solve. ^^ BitTorrent is always useful for mp3s, as is Kazaa (get lite, not regular, though, because regular kazaa eats computers x_o). Kazaa is easier though, and I suggest it first. Now for buying, I like CD Japan, and I've heard that YesAsia is good, too. I haven't bought anything from YesAsia, but I have noticed a lot more holes in thier catalog than CD Japan. Both places are about the same, price wise. As for which artists, well that's personal preferance. ^^ Are you looking for straight up pop, mainstream rock, harder rock, goth, punk, what? Every genre exists in the realm of J-music. Pop is pretty simple, for that I direct you towards bands run by the Johnny's (or Janis, I'm not sure which is right) management. They manage groups like Smap, V6, Kinki kids, and and some others, and now there's "Johnny's jr." which is groups like w-inds., flame and lead. ^^; For female singers, it's a bit more messy, but there's Ayumi (there's a thread on her about her, isn't there?), Utada Hikaru (she's a little less poppy than Ayumi), Nami Tamaki (she was mentioned in connection to Tofu), and a lot of others. I'm not big on female singers, so my knowledge of them isn't very big. ^^; For something more on the rock side, but not "hardcore" (or well, people who will tell you that ><) there's L'Arc~en~Ciel (my favorite, ever), Glay, Gackt (I consider him a little more rock than pop >_>), B'z (they're old, but still going ^^ love them), Globe (not a fan, again I don't like female singers much), and too many more for me to list. I listen mostly to visual kei, which is bands like X Japan, Malice Mizer (no longer together ><), Dir en Grey, Pierrot, Dual le Quartz (they broke up too, it's all Miyavi's fault =P), Psycho le Cemu (scary buggers, but they make great music ^^), and the lists goes on. I'm not much into harder non visual rock, so I can't help there. Info on the artists is pretty easy to come by if they've got any sort of English speaking following. ^^; Official sites are good, but almost always only in Japanese. Dir en Grey's site has an English mirror, though. I use fan pages more than official sites, since a lot of the widely known info tends to be "unofficial" even though it's obviously true. ^^ As far as the sites for companies, like Tofu, well, they're not very useful. -_-; Tofu is a bunch of clueless people who can't promote to save their lives. >< They have artist info for every artist they sell except L'Arc~en~Ciel, but it's info easily found in a dozen other places. It's all a bit biased too, which is annoying after awhile. -_-; I like sites like http://www.projectj.net. The forum there isn't very useful (bunch of idiots -_-), but the site itself is great. Don't have anything else to offer until more explicit inqueries are made. ^^; |
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sacchan
Posts: 277 Location: Okinawa, Japan |
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w-inds isn't Johnny's jr. I don't think flame is either.
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Arachne666
Posts: 7 |
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Sorry, I'm not that knowledgable about the uber-pop scene in Japan. Most of the forums I've been on clump them in with that group, because they do fall under that group. And if I'm not mistaken, at one of the members of w-inds was under the Johnny's Jr. management before joining W-inds. >< So it was a genre thing than an actually statement about actual management. ^^; I was hoping someone would take more away from what I said than that, though. =\
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