Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.

I see the OP and hope that’s who it actually is because he’s awesome. Cool to see someone I respect and admire on Lemmy so soon after joining.

Right then, onto the topic and off of the OP.

This is me as well, never been diagnosed but I check all the boxes. Underachiever, always heard I was destined for great things. One teacher even predicted I’d make the next Star Wars movie. This was after Jedi and before Phantom Menace. I hope that teacher never blamed me for Jar-Jar. Wasn’t me, I swear. Now Clones, I can get behind.

I recently (last couple years) heard a song that really speaks to me… except I can’t understand the words. It’s in Japanese. Japanese rap duo Creepy Nuts. They’ve done a few anime series but this one is one of their originals. They always have sharp and witty lyrics. I fear the lyrics on the official video are machine translated, maybe there are some better ones out there, but I feel the singer is speaking to all of us here.

(If it’s catchy it’s because nearly all Japanese syllables are open-ended, which means they end in a vowel, so rhyming gets real fun.)

The song is “To Us Former Prodigies” and here is the official YouTube video for it. You can read the translated lyrics if you hit the [CC] button. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dAzUOzWvrk