New J-Pop World Interviews

Our list of interviews with Japanese groups and related artists is growing each week. Checkout the lineup so far:

Yoshida Brothers - modern masters of the Shamisen.

Gina Hiraizumi - Japanese-American actress turned singer.

Kaila Yu - the lead singer of Nylon Pink and MySpace superstar.

The Crab Bubbles - Dale and Chiha Richard's group.

Kiyomi - a singer and songwriter from New York.

The Moist Towelettes - 2 Canadians and 2 Japanese singers.

Petty Booka - A Hawaiian style Japanese duo.

Rayna - an up and coming Japanese singer, dancer and model.


Linus of Hollywood - He wrote Puffy's song Kimi ga Suki as
well as Kaela Kimura's hit Magic Music.


Merrymakers - See what Anders Hellgren and David Myhr had to say
about writing and producing music for Puffy.

Butch Walker -
Read about Butch Walker's songwriting for Puffy and which of them he has had a crush on.

Puffy AmiYumi World now part of J-Pop World

Puffy AmiYumi World is now a part of J-Pop World - a new kind of Japanese music website.

There are already several excellent Japanese music websites out there but J-Pop World will be something unique. Rather than providing a small amount of info and news on a large number of Japanese groups we will provide lots of info and interactive features on a few featured artists.

Each featured artist will have its own site with an extensive biography,
a complete listing of all their CDs and DVDs, picture galleries, games, polls, discussion forums and a separate page for each of the group's songs. Song pages will include lyrics, song samples and as much information as I can find. In other words - just about anything you could think of to spark interest in the group among English speaking music lovers.

Our first completed featured artist site is for the duo Puffy AmiYumi. Puffy AmiYumi World is the internet's most popular unofficial website dedicated to Puffy with over 200 pages of info including the internet's most active discussion forum for Ami and Yumi.

There are currently two other featured artist sites under construction with more to come: Kaela Kimura World and GO!GO!7188 World.

We will also have profiles on other j-pop groups, songwriters and producers as well as interviews, featured articles, polls and a discussion forum to let our readers give input on which group should get the next full site.

So keep checking back as we grow and add new features.

Well a quick update. I’ll be doing two mini-fansites for Kaela Kimura and GO!GO!7188:

Kaela Kimura World

GO!GO!7188 World

One or both may then expand in 2008 into a full size fansite like Puffy AmiYumi World with an accompanying board at the Puffy AmiYumi forum. You can vote at Puffy AmiYumi World for what group you would like to see a fansite for.

Puffy's Official vs Fansite Alexa Rankings

There’s a lot of controversy about how accurate Alexa’s internet traffic rankings are since only people who are using the Alexa toolbar are being counted. If Alexa users are representative of overall internet users then it should give a good estimate of how many people are visiting different websites. Unfortunately it’s unclear if this is so (Alexa of course says it is).

But since it’s free info I thought I’d do an internet traffic ranking comparison between Puffy’s official English site and my fansite Puffy AmiYumi World. Here’s what I got on December 5th, 2007:

Sites	puffyamiyumi.com	puffyamiyumiworld.com
Global	915,503	698,037
US	553,531	378,446
Japan	177,850	290,414
Mexico	160,630	150,221
Philippines	103,792	36,779

According to Alexa the fansite Puffy AmiYumi World actually gets more traffic than does Puffy’s official English site. One curious statistic (either real or a byproduct of which countries use Alexa and which aren’t) is that only 22.2% of the traffic at their official site comes from the US, 16.7% comes from Japan and the rest are spread out all over the world. By contrast 40% of visitors to Puffy AmiYumi World come from the US and 20% from Japan.

Puffy’s official Japanese site scored much higher with an overall traffic rating of 227,608. It placed at 12,851 in Japan while only 643,272 in the US. Since the site is in Japanese it not surprisingly received 87.3% of its traffic from Japan with only 4.5% from the US.

Quest for Fansite Number Two

Hi, I’m Andrew the webmaster of the fansite Puffy AmiYumi World. Thought I’d set up a blog to go with my site.

The latest news is I’m looking for another Japanese group to make a fansite for. Puffy AmiYumi World was my first website and done in simple HTML. Now that I’m learning some more advanced CSS stuff I think I might prefer to use it to design a new website, rather than (yikes!) redoing all 300+ pages of my Puffy site.

I was looking at Shonen Knife but according to our forum member Anthony they already have a fansite with links to the group itself. I think I might prefer a newer group with only a couple of CDs out (making song pages for each song is time consuming lol).

I was checking out Go!Go!7188 this weekend. They have a “live concert’ on MySpace you can watch. Wow they can really rock. They also did some mini-tours of the US this year, some video of which you can also watch on their official website (which is very nicely done btw). Their official site also has a link (http://www.emimusic.jp/capitol/gogo7188/) where you can listen to each song from their CD “Parade.” Its music I really, really like.

But there are already several fansites or general Japanese group music sites with large sections on the group (I can now see why). So I don’t think yet-another Go!Go!7188 fansite is really needed. I think I’ll order a couple of their CDs from CD Japan and decide then. They are definitely on the short list. Oh the conundrum.

So any suggestions?