Public Service Announcement: WTF, iTunes?

This is a test of Rekuru’s emergency broadcast system.

This is an unscheduled post, but I must warn everyone about a safety hazard related to an application found in all good Mac-fearing households, iTunes. In a truly bizarre phenomenon I recently stumbled over, anime songs have begun to appear on iTunes. And not just the theme songs of big shows like Naruto and Bleach, but Aki Hata’s brilliant Lucky Star character songs. Which is great. Or would be, if they were the actual songs and not cover versions.

To be fair, one can’t accuse iTunes of fraud: all the songs are properly credited to artists other than the original. But an effort has clearly been made to make them sound like the originals, and for example, Haruhi’s God Knows (originally sung by her voice actress, Aya Hirano) is credited to some artist simply called Aya. It seems quite likely that the distributer hopes some people will buy these, mistaking them for the originals. Some of the covers are pretty good (I’m satisfied with the version of Zetsubou-sensei’s Kuusou Rumba I downloaded), but their Motteke: Sailor Fuku, an otaku anthem, is a disaster. Perhaps for some this is better than nothing; but I’m still awfully suspicious about how this is being put over.

The covers appear on albums called the Japan Animesong Collection. I read here that this is the result of a collaboration between iTunes, Bandai (the distributors of Haruhi and Lucky Star among others) and Lantis, the company which holds the rights to many of these songs. I’m no industry insider, but I’ve been slowing getting the sense that perhaps Bandai, bloated with arrogance from the success of Haruhi, views its American fans with contempt: take the inexplicably clumsy translation of the Lucky Star manga, and the spotty marketing of its heir apparent, Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens. I don’t know if there’s any truth in this, but I may do some research and get back to you guys.

In the mean time: these are great songs. You owe it to yourself to buy them in the original, even if it means paying Amazon’s exorbitant import prices. I just can’t stand the thought of some poor kid downloading the cover of Tsukasa’s Negide RESETTO and listening to it for months, taking it for the original. That would be, to quote They Might Be Giants, like “the people chained up in the cave, in the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy.”