Eurobeat Prime :: Forum

The day after Thanksgiving I posted an article on both on here and on IDForums expressing my fury about the termination of the EUROLOVERS YT channel after six years of bringing Eurobeat music around the world. I wrote an open letter to Roberto Gabrielli about the matter and he informed me that the person running the channel had started monetizing his videos when he was strictly told not to, which ultimately caused the termination. It seemed like the case was closed at that point, but then something interesting came up.

http://www.xadara.com/eurolovers-youtub ... -down-wtf/

A Eurobeat fana and a friend of his did some research on what exactly caused EUROLOVERS to be terminated and they discovered that on SocialBlade the channel was operated by someone in Japan, which made sense because we believed it was someone who worked for Avex, yet it was claimed by SAIFAM.

This caused a lot of confusion for some people. Why would an Italian music label claim a Japanese YT channel, especially if it was suppose to a fan one? Another interesting thing was that according to that website EUROLOVERS had never monetized his videos until the 12th of November. As I recall, that was around the time the channel uploaded music from SEB 241. So the question was: "What exactly happened?"

My guess is that either someone hacked the channel or some "Friend" took over and was doing it themselves and the person/people who originally ran the channel were not aware until it was too late. This could explain why Roberto and the others never got a reply because either the people didn't know or were busy trying to fix the problem themselves but ended up getting screwed over in the end.

After Christmas I got in touch with Roberto again and told him about this discovery and he was just as confused as I was. Right now, he and Clara Moroni from Delta are looking into the subject and will inform me if they find out anything.

While they're completely justified in taking the channel down if they started monetizing content that isn't theirs, it just feels like another symptom of a larger issue that's already been discussed to death. Eurobeat is Japanese for all intents and purposes, Japan is still stuck on CDs while the West has moved on to digital and streaming.

xiao wrote:To top it all off Avex doesn't really care what happens outside of their jurisdiction, cause they don't sell SEB outside of Japan.

It's the eurobeat producers that have a problem with piracy, hence them taking EUROLOVERS down ~ not Avex.

Get with the times SEB producers. Start a bandcamp if you really wanna sell your music digitally... tho don't be surprised when sales are nill to nothing.

Well, at least SCP, Saifam, and Hi-NRG Attack understand this. Delta of course had that mysterious reason for halting their online releases. Dima and SinclaireStyle were releasing their music digitally briefly, but stopped for some bizarre reason. Sunfire and GGM never even tried.

The issue to me is why can't older tracks by SCP, Time, A-Beat C, etc. be released in some form or another, whether through Avex Special Collections or label-published compilations? I remember SCP apparently isn't allowed to release anything they made before 2010, which I can only assume has something to do with AVEX.

xiao wrote:I don't understand why the labels don't put-up older music digitally myself either BUT I think it's that they just don't have faith that it'll sell, so why try ~ even though they've got nothing to lose.

But they're right, sales would be abysmal, so they're interested in just making crisp new tracks for SEB. Can't really blame them, music is a business to them after all, but to us fans (well at least to me) business has nothing to do with music.

Honestly, I think a major reason for SEB sales faltering in the past few years is because there is so little new music coming out and so little variety that there's just not much reason to be interested anymore. No, releasing older songs would not be super lucrative, but hey, Super Eurobeat albums are selling lousily too, apparently only a few hundred copies per release these days. Surely eurobeat's cult audience would contribute a significant percentage of new revenue to the labels if their unreleased songs were finally made available for purchase.

xiao wrote:

I think even the poor would dish out a few dollars to purchase the small handful of songs they really enjoy, if only they were readily available to them. Nobody should have to spend $30 just to own the new GGM song they like, for example.

I do not agree with you, xiao. In the same way of thinking I could say 'I don't have the money for a luxurious vacation to Japan, so I should get it for free'. No, that's not how it works. People are (trying to) make a living out of music production. How would you feel if people told you to just do your job and not pay you for it? :\

xiao wrote:

SuperEuroJimmy wrote:I do not agree with you, xiao. In the same way of thinking I could say 'I don't have the money for a luxurious vacation to Japan, so I should get it for free'. No, that's not how it works. People are (trying to) make a living out of music production. How would you feel if people told you to just do your job and not pay you for it?

I don't have a job brother, all the lies & goofy pictures you see thru social are a facade to mask the way I actually get money. <s>(and cause I'm a goofball)</s> And yes, all I need to live is 2 small meals a day, water, electricity, and internet. If you can provide that for me & maybe teach me a thing or two about sound design, which I love ever since I came back from being AFK for 5 years, I wouldn't need money.

Tomas Marin is driving a bloody $250,000 USD Ferrari ~ I think that constitutes as overpaid-taking-money-from-the-poor-filthy-rich in anyone's book. That picture up there with my personal definition of Piracy, wasn't talking about anybody other than myself.

I'm not trying to make a living doing anything ~ all I need is the high making music gives me, which is a thousand times better than the <s>drugs</s> medicine I've been an expert @ all of my life.

Man, I normally agree with you on so many levels, but I just can't this time. I highly doubt that the royalties that Marin gets from singing on SEB is nowhere close to being able to afford a Ferrari. Many singers and producers have everyday normal jobs where they can make their living. I think this is something that we forget as fans. We act like their being is to entertain us when they are trying to get through life as much as anyone else. I'm not flaming against you (<3), but that's just my thought

And secondly, I'm not sure what the actual hell DirectorK feels he/she is going to get out of this dead horse of a conversation? Okay, the channel got caught doing something wrong. How the f does this affect our daily lives or even us as fans? I would love to have a rational explanation of this. This whole thing acts a divisive point within our community.

Having been a part of this forum for 10+ years, stuff like this conversation goes absolutely nowhere because not all will agree on the same point. It will always be the sales vs. pirate question. Never goes anywhere.

xiao wrote:

SuperEuroJimmy wrote:I do not agree with you, xiao. In the same way of thinking I could say 'I don't have the money for a luxurious vacation to Japan, so I should get it for free'. No, that's not how it works. People are (trying to) make a living out of music production. How would you feel if people told you to just do your job and not pay you for it?

I don't have a job brother, all the lies & goofy pictures you see thru social are a facade to mask the way I actually get money. <s>(and cause I'm a goofball)</s> And yes, all I need to live is 2 small meals a day, water, electricity, and internet. If you can provide that for me & maybe teach me a thing or two about sound design, which I love ever since I came back from being AFK for 5 years, I wouldn't need money.

It's really not that hard to get a part-time job if you're tenacious enough. I don't know your age, but it's possible to budget your income if you're wise and studious. You're not just entitled to everything you want because the Internet exists. The economy is certainly still around, too, and evidently the Internet has distorted your grasp of just how precarious the music industry actually is.

Truth be told, the sharing of music is pretty much inevitable; even before mp3s, it was still common to discover new artists and albums because your friends owned them. However, at some point, we have to be self-sufficient about our belongings. We can't just depend on others to hand us a new album we can't afford one day every single time. Sharing is only intuitive as a means of advertisement, not social welfare. Our economy will not circulate unless we all buy things and services that others put in time, effort, and resources into.

Tomas Marin is driving a bloody $250,000 USD Ferrari ~ I think that constitutes as overpaid-taking-money-from-the-poor-filthy-rich in anyone's book. That picture up there with my personal definition of Piracy, wasn't talking about anybody other than myself.

Way to assume the majority of his revenues are from his stint as Mega NRG Man. More likely than not, he got rich either because his wife is wealthy or because he had some really successful job in the real world, with his singing career mostly just a hobby rather than a full-time living.

Some musicians don't really need the extra cash to make a living, but they are in the stark minority, especially today. There are hundreds of thousands of struggling artists without the backing of major labels who can only make so much by promoting their music online, so when a good percentage of their fans pirate it, the financial impact they suffer is devastating.

I'm not trying to make a living doing anything ~ all I need is the high making music gives me, which is a thousand times better than the <s>drugs</s> medicine I've been an expert @ all of my life.

If you don't make that much money, just listen to the few songs you do own. If they're particularly great songs, then surely they're worth more than just a few listenings. If you really need to listen to more music, then like I said, just get a part-time job. It'll easily cover even a large number of songs or albums you want to check out. I've bought a crap ton of new music over the past few years, but I purchased it either from my monthly allowance, my internship money, or, eventually, the income I made from my current job. If I did rip a song from YouTube, I would try to replace it with a version I bought as soon as possible.

The only reason to pirate music at all, in my opinion, is out of protest to those who are too stuck up to make their music easily purchasable online or, in Def Leppard's case, easy to locate at most supermarkets that still carry CD's.

Conversation will go nowhere but jesus christ, I am still mourning the loss of all those extended versions the guy has, especially the middle eurobeat era A-Beat-C tracks that were never released outside of JPN which I failed to download in time, (Yeah, I went there, and producers or Avex alike, that's because you guys don't make these easy for us to buy). All we have right now are those puss out 3 min+ extendeds, meh.

Eh too much speculation. The channel won't come back either. YouTube rarely brings back terminated channels. I say get over it and move on. You should have saved the videos you liked before the channel went down.

#Infinity wrote: Some musicians don't really need the extra cash to make a living, but they are in the stark minority, especially today. There are hundreds of thousands of struggling artists without the backing of major labels who can only make so much by promoting their music online, so when a good percentage of their fans pirate it, the financial impact they suffer is devastating.

If they can even manage to get some fans at all because if you're just a nobody the internet won't help you reach people without already knowing a lot of influential people or spending money on marketing.
It may have been quite easy for me to find a few fans for my Eurobeat stuff because there is a scene that's small enough so that a musician doesn't have much to do to get heard (there aren't many competitors, it's quite easy to find the few communities where you can share your stuff). On the other hand it doesn't help at all to make a living because the scene is too small for that.