This article is machine-translated and may contain errors. Please refer to the original Chinese version if anything is unclear.
From Tatsuro Yamashita’s obsession, a conversation about a subject we use every day but rarely think about seriously I recently went through some material about Daro Yamashita, and there was a quote from him that really struck me. Something to the effect that those who are not involved in the creation of a song are free to distribute it on streaming media and make a profit from it, and that this is a triumph of the market and has nothing to do with music.
I’m a committed streamer. spotify, netflix, resident on my phone and computer. If Tatsuro Yamashita is on streaming, I’m sure I’ll be the first to listen to it. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking his position is valid, and the kind of validity that’s hard to simply refute.
What he’s protecting
Tatsuro Yamashita doesn’t stream, not because he doesn’t understand the internet or because he’s old-fashioned. He actually uses Spotify to listen to other people’s songs all the time, and says he often swipes through the global Top 50 to get a sense of the vibe of current pop music. He just doesn’t want to put his own stuff on it.
To understand this, it’s important to know what level of “control freak” he is, and that’s a positive term. He records with vocals, harmonies, guitars, percussion, synthesizers, often all by himself, and the production is very demanding.
“I make a record and it’s my decision from the first note to the last. Putting it in a place where an algorithm can interrupt, skip, and shuffle at any time, to me that’s not listening to music, that’s consuming music.”
It’s not just royalties he’s protecting, it’s the integrity of an experience. An album to him is a whole, with a beginning, an end, a breath, something he wants you to feel. The logic of streaming is to take that whole and break it up into individual pieces of “content” and let the algorithms decide what you listen to next.
The conflict between these two things is not commercial, it’s philosophical.
Streaming is not an original sin
Enough about Tatsuro Yamashita, let’s talk about the other side.
How much of this City Pop revival has been pushed up by streaming and video sites? Including Tatsuro Yamashita’s own name, which is widely known among young people outside of Japan, in large part because of his songs appearing in various lo-fi remixes, video site covers, and Netflix song lists (even if those are unauthorized versions)
Which means his influence is, in a sense, amplified by the very thing he resists the most.
Think about how many people would bother to buy his CDs now if no one had searched for his RIDE ON TIME on bilibili or YouTube, and how many people would bother to buy his CDs now if the people who make City Pop song lists hadn’t pushed his name into the algorithms?Copyright embargoes sometimes rely on the spread of piracy instead to keep the heat on. The paradox is hard to solve.
The biggest contribution of streaming, after all, is that it lowers the threshold for “first time listening”. In the past, you had to rely on friends, record stores, and luck to hear a niche Japanese urban pop record. Now, if an algorithm pushes it to you one day, you can click on it right away. Anyway, this is true for the spread of music, and that’s how I’ve gotten to know a lot of music myself.
Streaming has changed what
Fewer people listen to an album from start to finish after streaming. It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that they don’t realize that there’s no such concept of a finger sliding or an algorithm automatically cutting it and then it’s on to another song. That experience of the album as a whole is slowly disappearing. Of course now when I swipe through the daily recommendations, I still subconsciously click through to the album page and click favorites, and then listen to it again in its entirety.
That’s not entirely a bad thing; singles were meant to be singles, and so many eras in pop music history have run on singles. But it does change the way we build relationships with music. It used to be that you’d listen to a record over and over again until you could hum every track, memorize every transition, and that record was tied to a certain part of your life. Now it’s more like, “That’s a good one,” and then you add it to the list and forget about it.
So on or off?
I don’t think Tatsuro Yamashita’s choice is the only right answer, but I don’t think he’s just playing around either. His choices were consistent; no TV, no big shows, no MVs (loosened up a bit later), and it all adds up to a complete creator stance. For most musicians, being on is pretty much a no-choice option. To not be on it is to not exist in the modern era. A newcomer who announces today, “I only sell CDs,” will most likely end up not as an artistic pioneer, but as a person no one knows. Tatsuro Yamashita can make this choice because he is already Tatsuro Yamashita, his name itself is traffic, and his existence itself creates a sense of scarcity.
This logic cannot be replicated or generalized.
But from our perspective as listeners, there is a hidden price behind the convenience of streaming: we are slowly losing the habit of “taking a song seriously”. It’s not because we’re lazy, it’s because the system is designed to keep you sliding forward.
Listening to an album from the first track to the last is not a ritual, it’s just a way of slowing down time. It’s deeper, it’s more like an honest conversation.
Streaming has given us a whole world of music libraries. But an infinite library, it’s kind of a shame if it makes you become anything less than a serious reader. If you want to listen to his music legitimately, buy the disk.