A nice article at Slate (slashdotted this morning) discusses the unfortunate isolation of music markets, with specific regard to the inability to purchase songs by Japanese bands that are available at the iTunes Music Store of Japan, if you are using a U.S. credit card. It does seem to have reached another level of ridiculousness when it would cost them no shelf space to enable the purchase of these songs. But as many slashdot comments point out, there are reasons. Not good reasons, but business reasons, of distribution deals that are limited to certain territories and such. And it's good to point out that this is not Apple's failing but the music industry's in general. Apple has only failed to revolutionize music distribution in one particular way that most people will probably never notice.

I can vouch for the quality of at least one band mentioned in the article, The Pillows. I discovered them as the performers of the theme song to FLCL, the great (anti-)anime series that Adult Swim introduced to the US a few years ago. Several of their other songs were used on the show too. It's pretty straightforward, heavy but upbeat rock, but something in their riffs and the mixture of Japanese and semi-nonsensical English lyrics is very appealing to me. The emotional associations I had between some of the songs and the show probably helped, but it's good stuff.

I started listening to Tommy February⁶ around the same time after seeing her video on a Japanese pop music tv show that I was watching as part of my language study. It's guilty pleasure 80's-style synth-pop, but again, the melodies and attention to detail raise it above the crowd. At the time I was shocked to find that at an artist signed to Sony had no page on the All Music Guide (maybe they should change their name), and few other references on the web, apart from a fansite or two. Today there is an essentially empty page on AMG, and a respectable page on Wikipedia. Check out the titles of her singles; I wouldn't know how to type the characters in most of them, but they are hilarious.

When I went to Japan in 2004 I visited the Tower Records in Shinjuku and agonized over whether to spend my $30 on a Pillows album or a Tommy February one. I analyzed which selections would give me the most songs per Yen. The Pillows seemed to have an odd system, perhaps common over there, in which at least half the songs on each 'album' were also randomly sprinkled throughout the other albums, as if they were all just different assemblages of the same 40 or so songs. I ended up getting one of those.

For some reason I never went beyond those two artists in exploring Japanese pop and rock (everything else on that J-Pop tv show was crap), but the Slate article has inspired me to do just that.