Our Man in Abiko points to this post on corruption within the Japanese entertainment industry (not that corruption is unique to the Japanese entertainment industry). I suppose the notion that mainstream entertainers have not necessarily achieved success based on their own merit is not shocking, no matter what country you’re in, but we’ll leave that to be debated elsewhere. Today we’ll simply celebrate the leveling possibilities of the internet, where a band with talent can get heard – at least to a greater degree than during the dark ages of almost total control by the large corporate labels.

Previously, music marketing went something like this: huge corporate marketing machines would tell obedient consumers what to like. That’s still going on, but the resistance is growing. These days, the success of social music platforms like Last FM and guys like Jonathan Coulton are proving that the best marketing happens when people with similar tastes have an easy way to connect with each other.

We are thinking about how we can support this more open tendency within the music world on our fatblueman channel on Youtube. To that end, we have been keeping our eyes open for talent that we might feature. And we think we have found some in this Nagoya duo, Secret Ocean. This is their song, Word. Turn on the captions in order to follow the lyrics in Japanese or English.

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