4/6/2006

I get worried sometimes that I’m missing out on awesome music or movies because of the language barrier. Back home I listened to the awesome Triple J which definitely tried to play songs from all around the world, but I can only think of maybe four from over the years that were in different languages.

I’ve been introduced to Japanese music via anime, as have a lot of gaijin fans. But still, I think that I’m missing out on a lot of great stuff. I usually am a radio whore but the amount of concrete you get in suburbia means that FM radio is near impossible to hear clearly. AM radio is okay, but not exactly the epitome of modern music promotion.

So, for most of my time in Japan, I’ve been paying unusually high attention to the music they play in shopping centres, watching the music countdowns on TV whenever I can find them, as well as buying random CDs from the Japanese section of Tower Records in Yokohama. I want to learn more about Japanese music. There is some awesome stuff out there, and it’s depressing to think that I might never get to hear the best stuff.

I had also been scouring the internet, looking for websites that would tell me more about the alternative rock scene in particular. It’s okay, but again, the language barrier is a problem.

Then I stumbled across Last.FM, formerly known as Audioscrobbler. I’d heard of it before, of course, but I have an aversion to signing up to stuff, so it remained for the most part ignored. But last year a tags system was developed, where the community could tag songs appropriately, then the audioscrobbler software could find different music similar to your tastes that you’d never heard before.

The system isn’t perfect, of course. There’s multiple entry tagging, such as ‘Jpop’ vs. ‘J-Pop’ vs. ‘Japanese Pop’ and the songs don’t always have perfect entry spelling or punctuation (a problem, especially with Japanese music, where random capitalisation is hip). There’s also only about 100,000 songs on the database to listen to. So you might find the band you heard about on “Adam and Joe Go Tokyo” years ago (after figuring out the correct spelling) but that doesn’t mean you can hear their stuff immediately. But you can put it in your profile until it IS in the database. Or, you can listen to music that’s been marked as similar.

100,000 songs may not seem like much, but I can plug POLYSICS or the pillows into the “find similar artists” search and have cool music to listen to for hours. And of course, as the popularity of Last.FM grows, so will the playlist.

It’s free, or there’s a dirt cheap paid account you can have for a few extra benefits. So, if you really want to hear more Japanese music, this is the easiest way, even if you’re living in Japan.

Link:
Last.FM