Brandnew J

» see j-wavemusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The closing notice appeared on 1 March 2011. It is a short page headed with the bracketed word for important, and it says that the internet service Brandnew-J would end all of its service provision on Thursday 31 March, at 27:00. Japanese broadcasting counts past midnight rather than starting a new day at it, so 27:00 means three in the morning on 1 April. The page apologizes and asks for understanding. It promises that the company will take responsibility for deleting the files left on the web server, which is a courtesy most shutdown notices do not bother with.

What it does not do is give a reason. There is no cause anywhere on the page, then or in the revised version J-WAVE put up on 1 April with the verbs moved into the past tense. What the notice offers instead is a list of places to go: J-WAVE's simulcast programs, it says, could still be enjoyed through radiko, and then it names USEN's SOUND PLANET and au's LISMO WAVE, noting that J-WAVE would be carried on the last of those from 15 March. Two of the three cost money. The free one is listed first.

Brandnew J existed because of a distinction in Japanese law. Broadcasting and telecommunications were separate regulatory areas, and the music rights a station cleared for the air did not carry over to the internet, so J-WAVE could not simply stream itself. It built a second station instead, with its own schedule and its own cleared music, and ran it for nearly five years until that problem stopped being one.

~ the case file ~

~ the offices its own signal could not reach ~

J-WAVE gave two reasons for building it, and the second is the interesting one. The first was that people were listening to music on computers now and the station wanted to be there. The second was that Tokyo had been putting up towers, and the number of places in its own city where its own signal could not be received had been going up with them. Brandnew J was aimed at offices high enough to be deaf to the FM band.

The public beta went up on 29 May 2006, after two months of closed test broadcasts, and full service followed on 2 October at ten in the morning. For the first year it had no programs in the ordinary sense, just named stretches of the day. BUON GIORNO! ran from ten to two and SIESTA from two to six, with the whole thing looping overnight. There were no fixed presenters, and the Japanese accounts are blunt about how loose it was, with days changing without warning. It was free and always had been, paid for by advertising, with a different sponsor for each weekday at launch.

Registrations passed a hundred thousand in November 2006 and two hundred thousand on 9 April 2007, which J-WAVE marked by releasing a desktop player gadget that ran only on Windows Vista. The target for that financial year was half a million. No higher number was ever published, and no figure of any kind appears after April 2007, so the last four years of the station are a numerical blank.

~ five or six stations up the mountain ~

At the launch press conference an executive from J-WAVE's music arm was asked how the rights clearance was going and said they were five or six stations up the mountain, which is the Japanese way of saying somewhere in the middle of a long climb. In the early months the station was contracting with music publishers one at a time.

That changed on 8 October 2006, when a centralized management scheme for using recorded music in broadcast programs distributed online came into force, with a published rate card running from about five percent of revenue down to a few yen per streamed hour. Nikkei's coverage of what J-WAVE did next says directly that the simplification is the background to it. On 22 November J-WAVE announced that it would start putting a real terrestrial program onto the internet in real time. It tried the idea for a single day on the 23rd, then began properly on New Year's Day 2007 with a late evening show.

The commercials were what stayed uncleared. During ad breaks the internet stream played preset music instead, while the song display on screen carried on showing whatever the FM feed was doing, and the site ran a standing note explaining this right up to the end.

~ the retreat ~

From 2009 the station began folding inward. The round-the-clock schedule gave way to weekday hours, and then to weekdays only, with the weekend dark and the stream restricted to listeners inside Japan. By April 2010 most of what was left was simulcast J-WAVE. A Silverlight version went into testing in April 2009 so that Macs could listen, and never came out of it.

Meanwhile J-WAVE had joined radiko's trial distribution on 15 March 2010, and radiko went to full service that December. The distribution partner Brandnew J had relied on, a Dentsu-backed project called kikeru, closed its iPhone app on 10 December 2010 and the rest of itself two weeks later. The last thing the living site ever posted was kikeru's shutdown notice.

One assumption is worth heading off, because the date invites it. The end of March 2011 is also when Japan's terrestrial digital radio trials were switched off, and three weeks earlier there had been an earthquake. Neither is the explanation. J-WAVE had walked away from its digital radio channel back in November 2006, so it had nothing left in that project to lose, and the closing notice was written and published ten days before the earthquake happened. The end of March is simply when Japanese things end, being the close of the financial year.

The address outlived the service. Today j-wave.co.jp/bnj/ still answers, and the page it serves is J-WAVE's guide to listening on radiko and podcast apps. The dead station's own path now holds the sign pointing at what replaced it.

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