The Klassic Note Spirit Part 7 – The Year 2013 and the Dawn of a New Era

Saturday, 10 November 2018 arrow_back_ios arrow_forward_ios

In the previous post, we talked about the (technically) 5th year point of Klassic Note, and the overall plan to celebrate the spirit that is to put it simply my passion for Japanese music appreciation. Moving on, we shall discuss how this led to a relaxation of song initiation in Klassic Note, and how that will transition to - after settling the anniversary stuff - actually dramatically changing the scene in Klassic Note for the next five years. Okay let's start.

The Klassic Note Spirit Part 7
"The Year 2013 and the Dawn of a New Era"

THE SEASON OF GIVING
2013 became "known" in Klassic Note (because I say so) as "the season of giving" probably because I decided to relax after the stringent rules that is the decision for 5-stars, the subsiding of artist activities, the rise of new artists and so on. So in the end, I gave pretty much everything I liked. This ranged from voice actress Hikasa Youko's solo artist debut which shortly ended in the following year with the collaboration mini-album being the most compelling, to sasakure.UK in giving his only collaboration album which did not feature Hatsune Miku (no really, go check him out you'll get what I mean) to Anime songs especially from the 2nd season of Anime "Oreimo" which of course you guys would know, has quite a history of ending theme songs from 2011, and indie artists including Kuso Iinkai who will end up contributing more than I would think in the following years. All in all, I may be cutting some slack, but in the end it did introduce many good songs among them which has since altered the Top 20 ranking in many ways than other.

SONG(S) OF THE DAY STANDARD
Long time ago in Klassic Note (well, around 2009), I noticed that the songs I listen matter in my everyday life. It is felt that pretty every day there can be a song to represent the day, and so in my diary entries ever since I can write a blog online (it was 2006 btw) I have been adding the song that was in my mind. However, it has been many years, the number of songs filling my mind have increased, and so shall the standard for tracking these songs. It's no Music Fest (a reference from a diary blog post I think from 2007 where I gave FIVE songs of the day), but instead of just giving one song per day in credit, I brought up the requirement to two. So, one for the start of the day, and one for the end. It eventually became the way for me to jot down the songs which woke me up in the morning and the song stuck in my brain before I go to sleep. Although this wasn't cemented until the following year, it became the current standard for giving songs some form of recognition in my everyday life at its ultimate honesty, instead of once every year.

INCREASED ONLINE PRESENCE WITH @KLASSICNOTE
And talking about song of the day, it's hard to ignore one of the biggest breakthroughs in Klassic Note administration and that is... creating an online presence! After much thought of bringing Klassic Note to a whole new level probably after seeing such success on that SoundCloud compilation of the Top 20 rankings for the year before, I created a start to what would be a whole new world for even myself: I opened a Klassic Note Twitter account. Yeah. This was quite a huge thing for me personally since (1) I have never used Twitter despite it being one of the earliest in social media and (2) I don't really like to share the songs I listen to the people around me considering I don't live in Japan nor USA and everyone here is at this point listening to K-Pop which makes Japanese songs feel irrelevant... you get the meaning. Anyways, this account - which was created intentionally on 31st December 2013 (yeah) - was initially used to track the new songs of the day with the help of the Internet since before that I literally had to do it in pen and paper, or SMS, or anything along those lines. So yeah, it was convenient, but as you would have noticed became much of use in the following years as I start to maybe interact with (especially) indie artists and artists I know over time.

Finally the Klassic Note Twitter page is open! VISIT the new 5th anniversary page @ http://t.co/RUSoX9bR3c
— Kaineng (@KlassicNote) December 31, 2013

(Wow my first Tweet was really lame but yeah it introduced the special website for 5th year)

2013 has been a good year. Happy 2014 everyone. Here's to a even better year ahead! pic.twitter.com/8REwK84ZDa
— Kaineng (@KlassicNote) December 31, 2013

(Okay this was slightly better as it featured my shelf)

Also, I took the liberty to use my personal YouTube account (I mean, you'll notice) to create a playlist of all the music videos I can get my hands on over the Internet as it continues to emerge as the most convenient way to listen to new songs since it's expansion into Klassic Note two years ago. The playlist is now still populated with the latest, maybe not the best, but this shows the openness of music companies and artists posting their songs online for the world to listen as the Westerners have done since the service's inception. Hey, what can I say? Later is better than never, as many companies still withhold their artsts' work (even if little) through geographical limitations, still making this compilation challenging as ever. As of 2017 more than 300 songs have graced this playlist, and I'm glad it's only going to grow from here on.

CHANGES TO SONG AWARDS
In the house of Klassic Note that is the song rankings, many changes were made to facilitate the changes in listening habits over the years. This was done to give more recognition (as mentioned in the previous year) to the little details of the Klassic Note songsphere (wow I like this terminology) which I might oversee as it wasn't significant enough over the past few years to give some talk about them. The most prominent of them was a "Female Solo to Male Solo Ratio" was inserted into the Vocal Styles Popularity Survey (I need to change this name, seriously) to emphasise the over-arcing differences between my bias as a human male for favoring female vocalists, regardless of whatever songs I give. This particularly will make a difference in following years giving some awareness (personally) for this gender bias in Klassic Note over the past five years.

The year's results also retired several ideas introduced to the Song Awards including the newly introduced B-side Survey due to its complexity in calculation (which will make its comeback in the following year) and reverting back to one Song of the Month list instead of putting it with two other compilations which have been partially integrated to yearly compilations.

THE PLAN FOR 5TH YEAR PART DEUX
As mentioned in the previous post of the series, 2013 was still focused on moving away from the 5th year celebration and pushing as many of the ideas for it as possible by the end of the year, all while listening to new songs and getting this year's list going. The 5th year compilations surprisingly starting with the article "THE" because I thought it was a wonderful idea to show exclusivity, got made into physical form unlike many other compilations which stayed as a digital playlist ie. just a notion, and I can prove it because it's still on my shelf and some of the images can be seen below.

The covers for the three anniversary compilations

For THE EMOTIONALIST, a short summary and lyric quote for what makes the song emotional

I will never reach the level of Japanese CDs to any extent, but this goes to show just how far I would go to make this happen, and this, I'm proud of the result. Also, for Collection Artist compilations too, I made physical copies of them. These are all for you guys, artists. Another thing that was pushed in the middle of the year was making video adaptations including full song previews in a disced video release also known as DVDs. (I mean, is it obsolete yet? lol) And that, though not as wonderful as the CDs above, signaled a whole new level of compilation production which I must say is as impressive as it was tiring as one of these (signalling a year's rankings) took like a week of continuous editing, I swear. You guys would have noticed these from the later publicly released on the official website (we're close to that part of the discussion) short version of this release, without the music videos since it's too much copyrighted material.

The (if you know of) DVD menu of the release in the 2013 compilation

The animation that inspired what you see in the videos from the official website today

THE YEARLY SECONDARY COMPILATION
Also in continuation of the things I'm doing for the 5th Year Anniversay in Klassic Note, I went ahead to do a couple of things I did intend to do but not until the end of the year leaning on to the following year. Most notably for the idea of yearly secondary compilations other than the three (GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE if you could recall) compilations set back in 2011, I compiled a trend-type compilation featuring a set of (in this year's) Anime theme songs for the last three months of the year, featuring Anime I watched and many which I don't, which was a surprise. Titled "The Indisputable Anison", I thought of bringing out the wonders of Anime theme songs (not to be confused with the Anime genre in Klassic Note) as they set new grounds for making new, catchy, and easy-listening tunes.

THE PRE-ORDER FEVER OF GIFTS
In the face of spending my hard-earned money (not really) on CDs, thinning out the list of discs I need to purchase to fill up my shelf, it has finally plateaued in 2013 where I've reached the maintenance period meaning I have to only buy singles or albums on demand, and thus gave me the thought of doing two things which are revolutionary different to buying over the past year: caring for pre-order and its special gifts, essentially taking timing into the equation when reviewing releases. I must say the biggest disadvantage of appreciating releases this way definitely paved the way for giving songs much more haphazardly as the idea of a ceiling made it way more extreme to give singles because that girl is so cute on that limited edition "bromide" photo (Toyosaki Aki was the best example with single "CHEEKY" which received the lowest 3-star rating by the end of the year) or not giving releases because we were this close to giving it and not giving will save me money and energy to give a review of it in later years. This controversial consumer change made it actually expensive to maintain my shelf and surprisingly, give bias to releases which should appear on my shelf.

These two singles from Kotobuki Minako (left) and Hikasa Youko (right) will be known as the first attempts of pre-ordering singles (one day) before release date, and from one of the hardest-to-get online stores Animate.

Next up: The Klassic Note Spirit Part 8 – The Year 2014 and the Transformation Period
(This is where things really took a turn...)

(**All linked references ago were active at time of publishing this post. They are meant for educational purposes and not are not taken directly from any intellectual property)