Yay for Teh Internetz and the awesome denizens thereof

[shadowspar]

How did people in remote Northern Ontario ever find out about random awesome K-Pop and Russian girlpop bands before the age of the Internet?

Oh, that's right, they didn't.

Comments

[shadowspar]

Waaay up here in the sticks, there's no way I'd ever find out about pretty much any music that originated outside North America without the miracle that is the internet. When I got back from Japan with a voracious appetite for MOAR JPOP, it annoyed & frustrated me to no end that there was no way to hear Japanese music over here, or to reasonably purchase CDs save trying to convince someone there to buy them and mail them to me. I mean, they're digital audio! They're just great big bags of bits; you can send them anywhere in the world easily! And so my frustration with the Global Muzak Industry interminably attempting to Shut Down The Entire Internet, because the 'net is the only way I can find >75% of the music I like. </rant>

Thanks for your role in connecting me with marina's post and with great music in general, BTW. <3

[torachan]

But I meant I was sending tapes to people who didn't know about jpop. :) I was really big into penpals before the internet (whose names I got from penpal columns in magazines) and I loved sharing my love of jpop, so I would try to get my penpals into it. And most of the stuff I taped was from stuff I owned or rented myself, but I also got a couple mixtapes myself from penpals in Japan.

It's a million times easier to share music now, but it did happen before, is what I was trying to say.

But I think my experience is not typical in many ways, because one reason I never had the "these people on the internet aren't real/I can't trust anyone on the internet" feelings is that I'd had so many penpals before, so I was used to having friends I didn't physically interact with. (And I did meet several of my penpals in person, too.)

Insightful commenter is insightful ^_^

[shadowspar]

At first, I was going to say that things weren't quite the same, because if you didn't have anyone else in your social circle who was into music from overseas, nothing ever filtered its way down to you...but that's not really true, is it? It was still possible to find people to talk to or correspond with who were interested in such things (via magazines or elsewhere). And really, even though there are all kinds of sites and forums and various media feeds dedicated to sharing music (some much less social than others) it still comes down to people doing the sharing, doesn't it? =)