Dear all,
Many of us found about jrock thanks to the Internet, members of our team included. But we do everything we can in order to organize a distribution of the albums of the artists who accepted to work with us: even if you can't find their albums at your local music store (it's easier for us to contact French music stores after all), you can use our mail order system or ask the shop where you usually buy music to contact us. As for items we're not selling yet but you'd like to buy please ask us and we will try to negociate interesting prices with the "deciding people" in Japan.
In any case: there is now a distribution for these artists, at least in France / Western Europe, so please respect the artists' intellectual rights and -buy- the items, instead of simply downloading them and storing them on your computer (or cd-roms): it's also to allow you to buy these items at normal prices that we try to negociate good prices! And yes musicians only get a few pennies every (sold) album, but if no one ever buys their music you can be sure they won't be able to produce any music anymore as they won't be able to live on their music anymore. And just have a look to the Beatles' career and you'll see that even one of the worst deals in the music industry ever can be enough to give more than enough money to the musicians, as soon as people buy the albums, videos, and such!
(One last word: Every album you see at 10 euros (sometimes even less) in anime shops -are- bootlegs, often made by "corporations" like HK, SM, and alike: not only won't the musicians (or any person who made the album: musicians, producers, designers,...) receive a single penny from your money, but also (and mainly) will your money go to some really really weird (and not recommanded at all) corporations, mainly Asian corporations (China, Hong Kong, such) but this is not important. And this is why the bootlegs market is even worse than downloads: when you download something you don't pay anyone but your provider, who may make you pay far too much money for its services but at least he's not as "weird / not recommandable" as these "bootlegs corporations". So please don't support bootlegers and keep you money to buy real cds, furthermore because they're of far better quality, and then the musicians will get some money! It's normal to give those who give you some minutes of pleasure some salary, don't you think?)
Thank you for your understanding,
The Ongaku France association team.