Laurence02

but only the Tetsu era

Ah yes, Kupiku and magius, the cancer of Discogs. I share your sentiments!

Ah yes, Kupiku and magius, the cancer of Discogs. I share your sentiments!

You are a person with a good taste.

As much as I like the current scene, I do think there's been an over-reliance on software synthesizers. When I use the term "over-reliance", I refer to softsynths being used as a crutch instead of an asset. I wish that budget bands embraced more traditional methods than trying to half-ass their way through default plugins (...but that requires talent :V).
 
Though, I will say that any sound, including this one, is subject to being called "generic" when it's used a lot. Idk, I guess it's just a product of the times. 

What about this: All those who want access to the download section have to provide X releases themselves before they can download other's material? Would that be possible to implement?

@Tokage I can think of a few reasons:
 
Buying music is expensive in this scene. People spend a lot of money to import CDs of their favorites and a lot of the time, that's the only way this music ends up in international waters. It is important to know that when this began, people were not just taking links but taking credit for them too, and then sticking monetization pages like Ad.Fly on top of it so that they could basically make money off of piracy. People like validation for spending money to bring joy to others. Whether that's a good thing is another discussion entirely. When people take links and put it on their blogs and don't redirect others back to the source, it fragments the scene. There are a lot of people in these visual kei groups that don't even know Monochrome Heaven exists, but if we were to go down tomorrow they'd suddenly have no place to get 40%+ of the music in the visual kei scene, because JPopSuki doesn't have everything to the degree that we do. Now whether putting our name out there like that or not is a good thing is, once again, a completely different discussion. On the other note of the same coin as #2, people putting links out there while crediting Monochrome Heaven amplifies the target on our back, and the backs of the uploaders. A small subset of releases that get leaked here weren't ever supposed to be leaked here, and those with connections to band members who gave them the music in confidence could get into hot water. I've been the target of this myself for uploading rare live distributed releases in the past, so I know this isn't just bullshit. Taking the link itself doesn't add any layers of redundancy. Once the link disappears/gets taken down/is otherwise unavailable, there isn't another place to go get that link because all 343 blog spots that track visual kei uploads from Monochrome Heaven were too fucking lazy to upload it to their own account, so in a flash all of the links for a release get taken down and there's no way to find it again. The value in blogs is that the links are preserved in multiple places. People who go through the effort to add redundancy to the scene are doing us all a service. People who just lift links and put it on their blog to stroke their ego suck dick and do nothing valuable with their free time. As an extension to 4, when a link for a very popular release goes online and that link spreads like wildfire, it endangers the account of the original uploader, who may have other valuable musics and personal things on that account. If that account gets terminated, it's not just one link that goes offline: it's multiple. This is how music gets lost to time. People who steal links are often lurkers who contribute little to Monochrome Heaven but owe a lot to our existence, which is why there is so little we can do about them. Hell, there's a chinese service which basically steals all of our links, hosts it themselves, and then puts ads on the site to make money. $cumbag central.  
This complaining can be annoying from time to time, but there are very real considerations underneath the hood that shouldn't be brushed off. On one hand, yes, people will always take music and you shouldn't share anything publicly that you would want to see publicly. On the other hand, there are right and wrong ways to share music, right and wrong reasons to share music, and the right and wrong places to do it too. When you lump all of these considerations into "this person just wants his dick sucked for promoting piracy", you lose a lot of the other aspects to the situation too. It's very complex, and the moderation team has tried (and failed) many different approaches to ameliorating the situation, but it is what it is.

Well done! I'm proud of you lol