This year I spent $1,000 on livestream music requests (paying a popular YouTube channel to listen to songs of my choice, and giving their honest opinion). Why?

At the beginning of 2023 I found out about the incredible Japanese band, BAND-MAID, and it wasn’t lost on me that I was discovering them for the first time on their 10th anniversary. So that got me thinking: Are there other bands in Japan that are just as good, that are in the very beginning stages of their careers? In my opinion the answer is YES, to the tune of hundreds—possibly thousands—of great bands who deserve to be celebrated and supported. Many of them have been around for years and still have not found the support that they deserve.

So these livestream requests were part of a larger experiment to find out what I could do online to raise awareness and hopefully create new fans of their music, who will go on to support and celebrate these bands in their own way. I tried /r/JapaneseMusic, /r/ListenToThis, Twitter, Instagram, Nostr, TikTok, Noderunners Radio, and the livestream requests on Twitch. There ended up being small but distinct communities in each one that appreciated what I was doing.

At first, what attracted me to paying a relatively huge amount of money on the livestream requests was that these reaction videos would be edited down to individual song reactions and would go on to live in the “YouTube network,” which could potentially benefit from that algorithm and reach even more people that find it much later on. Around 99% of the reaction videos sat at 100-1,000 views, and then a couple were hitting 3,000 views with dozens of people subscribing to the official YouTube channels of those bands. A few people even told me they bought all of a bands’ albums after learning about them from those reactions. But something unexpected happened that really surprised me: Because everyone in this community was in agreement that BAND-MAID was the pinnacle of high quality music in Japan, it became a fun challenge for me to prepare requests that could meet this standard by each deadline, which was often every Tuesday and Friday for months on end. Sometimes the song I chose would work, sometimes it would flop, sometimes a song I thought was truly outstanding would get a lukewarm reaction, and I would need to go back to the drawing board and start over. And so what shocked me was that this process of researching the music on my own and then bringing it to a community for review (and paying for the privilege) motivated me to learn about new Japanese bands far, far beyond what I would have ever done on my own. It became a responsibility: I took it upon myself to find a great new song every day, and especially because of how TikTok works, I can share what I find there in real-time to an audience eager to hear what I’ve found.

All this to say: It remains to be seen whether any of this moves the needle. It has definitely been helpful to a lot of people—perhaps more than I know. My focus right now is on TikTok, because the algorithm there seems to be the most conducive to going viral. But now I am on the lookout every single day for great new music—Japan is certainly holding its end of the bargain by creating it.

October 15th, 2023