Juscli (ジャスクリ)

» see juscli.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The company behind Juscli was incorporated on 20 July 1967, forty years before the station existed. 株式会社セントラルミュージック is a Bunka Hoso group business whose actual trade is music copyright management and publishing, which is to say paperwork about songs. In June 2007 it put up a website and started streaming shows, and the name it chose was the two words Just Click, squeezed into Juscli.

The site opened on Friday 15 June 2007 with four programs going live together, all weekly, all updating on Fridays. One of them went to YK型, which was Bunka Hoso announcer 吉田照美 paired with 小島嵩弘, so a familiar broadcast voice was on the schedule from day one. The other three were given to musicians. That pattern held for eleven years: the hosts were overwhelmingly the artists whose rights the company looked after, and the shows were a promotional channel built in the shape of radio.

It grew past the website. There were seven editions of ジャスクリ音楽祭, the first on 21 January 2009 and the last on 23 August 2011. A folk strand called 新東京フォークデイズ ran its own live nights. Bunka Hoso carried a Juscli special on terrestrial radio on 1 April 2009. In summer 2013 the station held an audition aimed at music vocational school students and put the three finalists on a stage in Roppongi on 6 November, then broadcast the result as a program. It ran on Windows Media until 7 February 2014, when it moved to HTML5 and H.264 and finally worked on a phone.

At least 40 regular programs and 23 specials went out over eleven years, and both of those tables on the Japanese Wikipedia entry are marked incomplete, so 63 is a floor. The last episodes went up on Friday 22 June 2018. The site closed eight days later on 30 June, and the notice says 動画配信サービスを終了いたしました with no reason attached to it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ two episodes, and sometimes none ~

One line of housekeeping text on the front page defines the entire service: 前回・前々回分の放送は各番組ページにて再生可能です。（注：過去分放送を行っていない番組もございます。） The last episode and the one before it are playable on each program's page, and some programs do not carry past episodes at all. That was the archive, in full. A third episode back did not exist anywhere, and for part of the schedule the only episode that existed was the one currently up.

The station was free and needed no account, and it carried no advertising code of any kind beyond Google Analytics, so nothing about the limit was a revenue mechanism. It was a rights decision rather than a storage one, which is the ordinary arrangement for Japanese net radio and still looks severe written down. Juscli handed the audio over for nothing on the condition that you could not hold on to it. For contrast, Radicon, TBS Radio's download shop of the same era, charged 210 yen for ten minutes of talk precisely so that the file became yours.

~ the bands who got big afterwards ~

Because the hosts were working musicians, the station kept catching people on the way up. Silent Siren had a weekly show on it from 6 April 2012 to 27 September 2013. 打首獄門同好会 ran 10獄放送局 through most of 2014. Both are established touring acts now, and the radio they made back then is not retrievable, because each episode came down two weeks after it went up, under the policy the station had run on since day one.

The roster reached past music, too. 緑川光 and 白石涼子 brought voice-acting audiences in, and テニスの王子様 オン・ザ・レイディオ ran as a monthly from July 2008. Further out at the edges there was 新潟めぐりGO!GO!レルヒさん, made with a local FM station in Shibata to promote a prefectural mascot. KOKORO AID RADIO started on 6 May 2011, two months after the Tohoku earthquake, and ran until February 2013.

~ nine months of identical bytes ~

There was no advance notice. The homepage digest is byte-for-byte identical from 12 September 2017 to the last live capture on 29 June 2018, which is nine and a half months of a page nobody touched. On 2 July the same address is a farewell, thanking you for your long patronage and saying nothing about why.

One event inside that window looks like a warning and is not. 新テニスの王子様 オン・ザ・レイディオ left Juscli on 1 May 2018, seven weeks before the end. That was 配信終了, a program ending its web distribution, and the show itself is a Bunka Hoso terrestrial broadcast that is still on the air. A single title leaving a platform is the most routine thing that happens in radio.

~ what the notice calls it, and who kept the paperwork ~

For eleven years the page title read インターネットラジオ｜ジャスクリ. The shutdown notice describes the thing being shut down as a 動画配信サービス, a video distribution service. The programs had been getting filmed as well as recorded, which is where this format in Japan was generally heading, and the company's final description of its own product no longer contains the word radio.

Central Music is alive. The site at jcm.gr.jp is maintained and current, and Juscli appears nowhere on it, not in the corporate history and not in any list of past work. Eleven years of output from a firm whose whole business is keeping track of who made which recording, and neither the recordings nor the record of them survived.

~ the part that is shut to everybody ~

I was at university in 2007 on a TTNet line, so a buffering Windows Media stream is familiar territory and the delivery layer here holds no mystery for me. The content does. These were Japanese-language shows built around specific performers, made for people who already followed them. There was no door into that for me.

What is different about this gap is that it has stopped being about where I was sitting. Whoever had the Juscli page open in Tokyo on 29 June 2018 cannot go back and hear any of it either. The station spent eleven years deleting itself two weeks at a time, and then finished.

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