Download Japanese music legally?

You know, like a pay-per-download or something similar, as long as it's legal. I'm sure there are plenty, but I need one that I can use United States dollars in the United States with. Thank you very much for your help.

Doesn't anybody know where and how I can download Japanese music legally? Thanks again.

I read an article lately of a guy in the music industry who travelled to Japan to do some research. One of his findings is that in Japan, downloading music from sites such as iTunes or whatever isn't popular. That Japanese folks are leary of using credit cards over the net and would rather pay 20 bucks for a cd. So finding a good download Japanese site is near impossible.

There are too many sites, but i-tunes music store has not been started in Japan.

It is not so popular downloading music file to PC but to Cellular.
The market of downloading music file to Cellular has be grown up more than the market of CD in this year.

http://music.msn.co.jp/
http://music.yahoo.co.jp/download/
http://www.oricondd.com/index.html
http://www.excite.co.jp/music/store/
http://www.ongen.net/
http://atmusic.avexnet.or.jp/
http://www.listen.co.jp/index.html
http://mora.jp/

In Japan CD rental is very common. For example, you can rent a latest CD for Y300 for one night or an existing CD for Y300 for a week.

On the other hand, download music in Japan is so pricy (for example, a tune for Y300), recorded in a proprietary format, and strictly copyright protected.
Simply no one buys them.

none of sites above is useful in the U.S.'cause i cannot pay with dollar, only
Yen...

I have a solution - although I wish there are better ones out there, so if anyone has suggestions please add it in for us.

My solution :
1) Search on internet for people selling iTunes Japan Recharge Cards.

2) You can get 2000Yen or 5000Yen cards, and you simply pay a premium on top using your Credit Card (any country) so the seller could buy you a unique card from an actual Japanese store on your behalf.

3) They can then either just send you the Code required to activate the account via email, or you pay them a postage and they send you the actual card. The 1st method is much quicker and complete fine. I've done it.

4) When you open iTunes software, you have to reset the Country that you're in. There's an icon in there somewhere, which wasn't overly easy to find for me, but it was there.

5) You need to activate the account using a brand new email account. So just any hotmail, gmail, etc, would be fine. Please do this first before proceeding.

6) You get a new account name under iTunes Japan, using your new email addy, and your Unique iTunes Japan Charge Card's code.

The thing to watch out for in step 6 is, you can't actually use the Add New account function normally because it won't let you 'pay' using anything other than a credit card (Japanese one obviously). You have to go to the trouble of locating the 'Charge Card' tab on the Japanese iTunes website to activate it. Just a nuisance for the first timer. I could help you further if you have questions.

7) Log in. Then download whatever you want. Remember iTunes music have DRM so you can't play it on anything other than your PC or iPod, and its limited to max 5 PCs at a time.

But currently the solution is to use QTFairUse 2.4 to deride the DRM protection, only suitable for actual Song Owner, then after that you can play it on any machine supporting AAC/M4A.

Try tunebite or audials for drm problem. Once you get your music running from itunes, you will never have drm troubles, thanks to the above. But please do not share music illegally, because this is one of the reasons we cannot download anywhere. You can purchase music on cd, just search. They may accept paypal

You could try jlist-
http://www.jlist.com/
they sell japanese itunes cards that can be used on the japanese itunes store, outside of japan. I have bought from jlist before and they were reliable...

Just realised that i gave you the address of the section of the site that you need to be an adult for (since they sell adult stuff too eg hentai) use http://www.jbox.com
same site, just without the adult products so anyone can browse. Happy hunting :P

I found another site that sells those cards, in increments of 1000 yen up to 10,000. You pay in US dollars with a credit card or paypal. It's a membership site but it's free to join. http://www.jpopmp3s.com

Just search in google under "Japanese music download sites" and different sites pop up in English. There are a number of them.

You can pay by Y by purchasing Japanese music gift card, but how do you create an account with any music download website?
They all ask for a credit card which is issued in Japan and have Japanese billing address.

Because of author's rights, and the difference of market's system, you'll never be able to purchase Japanese musics from Japanese sites by your credit card issued in your country.

(an example ans for iTMS)
http://forums.macnn.com/89/macnn-lounge/254638/does-anyone-h...

There is a really good store to download Japanese music internationally. It's called HearJapan and they don't have any country restrictions (so you can buy in Japan or whatever country you live in). It's a really good deal with quick downloads. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to download legally.
http://www.hearjapan.com

Some songs are also avaiable on iTunes countries other than than the US and the UK. Utada's Japanese albums are on UK iTunes and I think US iTunes as well.