An Open Letter to Japanese Popular Music Executives and Producers: We, the foreign fans of J-Pop, would like to express our wishes for what we would like to see happen in our relationship as fan and idols. Most of us understand your culture enough to understand why your relationship with us foreign fans appears to be pretty non-existent, but would like to encourage you to seek ways to build a relationship with us and gain more fans. The major problems facing the industry when it comes to foreign fans are two things. Those two things are accessibility and affordability. Fixing these two things will greatly improve your foreign fan to idol ratio, increase profits and worldwide recognition. We would like to see J-Pop become more accessible. Currently, in order to purchase many J-Pop albums or singles, one must either order online from a Japanese retailer or have access to a Japanese book store that sales music. In many countries, there are not many Japanese book stores. And many that do have limited selections that are very pricey, and there is no way to preview the content. It can be very troublesome to choose what to buy when you do not know what the content is like. Why would someone want to spend a lot of money on something they don’t know whether they’ll like or not? Buying online is not much better. Not only does one have to buy the expensive cd, they have to pay a huge shipping cost to get it them in a decent span of time. Sure, we could use surface shipment. But then we would have to wait 2 or 3 months to receive something that we could’ve downloaded from the internet in less than a few minutes if it were more accessible. There is now an ever growing selection of J-Pop on iTunes and other similar places. We would like to see this trend continue. We do not mind paying a little extra to buy the songs online. The convenience wins over the price. Plus, we are able to sample the songs before we buy them, thus increasing the likelihood of them being bought over those not available online or without the ability to screen them. There is also an ever growing selection of J-Pop on YouTube. We would also like to see this trend continue. We would love to see more official YouTube accounts for artists. We want to be able to watch the promotional videos that you work so hard and spend so much time and money into putting together. Please, put advertisements on them or something to make it profitable to put them on YouTube. Many of our computer drives cannot play the DVDs that you include with many of the albums and singles. You could also look into providing them with the music on iTunes, so that we would have to pay to buy them and watch them whenever we want to. We would also like to see fan clubs especially for foreign fans. We love your idols and wish to take part in fan club activities and be able to connect with them in ways only fan club members are able to. Or create special Facebook and Twitter accounts to share official news with foreign fans as well as Japanese fans. We believe as you come to make yourselves more accessible to the foreign fans that you will be able to make your albums and singles more affordable for all your fans. There are plenty of free opportunities now to connect with us. We are waiting for you to accept us as fans and help us make it easier to share your wonderful work with our friends. Your talents are amazing and we adore them. We want to listen more, watch more, and participate more. We want to buy merchandise and music. We want to support your talents and your companies. And someday, we want to go to concerts and dance and sing along to the music that you produce through your performers. Thank you so much for your time and for reading our selfish pleas. Thank you so much for everything and sharing what you with us. Please continue to share more. Signed – Your Foreign Fans

To the Foreign fan: Please sign this. Please translate this. Please share this. If you by any chance want it to be easier to get a hold of the music and the videos and be able to connect more easily with the artists via concerts, twitter, facebook, etc. Please sign this! I plan on sending this to the offices of some of the biggest names in Japanese agencies. For Johnny's I also plan on sending plans for a concert convention in America! So please sign! The more signatures the bigger opportunity we have of getting heard!!

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