I have been using Spotify for a year or so. One of its advantages over Pandora for me is its access to artists from the very mainstream to obscure and even foreign. With Spotify, I have been able to enjoy artists from every part of the globe except one: Japan. For some reason, no access is allowed. When I typed in Ayumi Hamasaki, a very well-known Japanese artist, I only got access to bootlegged versions of her music. It was quite a bummer and I had resigned myself to having to hunt down her music through the web. It sucked to have to switch from Spotify to my regular music player if I wanted to listen to Japanese music. Downloading over 100 tracks takes a lot of time and precious space.
But when I typed in her name about five months ago in June or July, I noticed that instead of a blank avatar, there was the woman herself. I clicked on her and discovered all her albums since 1999. I found myself listening to both my old-time favorites –”Dearest,” “Sparkle,” “Rule” – from my first exposure in the fourth grade to her more recent pop, club music, like “Merry-go-round.”
I knew that if well-known music stars such as Ayumi Hamasaki, who is deemed one of the richest females solo singers in the world, were now available, so might less mainstream Japanese artists as well. Sure enough, a week ago I looked up Do As Infinity, a band I have always been fond of and found all of their albums. Maybe it was a copyright issue that had made streaming music of such artists on music players hard to find outside of YouTube, which could even be censored itself. But I, along with other fans of Japanese music, am thrilled to now have a wider selection of Japanese music just a click away on Spotify.