INDEX
When Music Gets Caught in the Numbers Game
This documentary takes as one of its central themes the question of how music is delivered. Watching LOSTAGE’s activities in the film, you can’t help but feel a sense of unease about a society that seems to equate value with numbers — through streaming, YouTube, or social media — and operates on the assumption that bigger is inherently better.
Gomi: The world itself can’t function without those systems, and resisting decisions made by numbers is basically impossible. That said, I still feel a strong discomfort with the idea that everything can be measured numerically. There’s a real burden in constantly counting based on the assumption that bigger is better.
In the film, you also mentioned that “there’s no answer to why more people listening would be better.”
Gomi: Take a song that’s only been played three times — does that make it “bad”? You can’t really know. You don’t know the feelings behind those three listens. The weight of a single CD, the care in each encounter, gets lost, and it feels strange to act as if it doesn’t matter who listens or how, as long as the numbers climb and it “goes viral.”
The world is moving in a bizarre direction, and everyone is stepping onto the same scoreboard. You feel the discomfort, yet you still play the numbers game because, well, that’s just the way it works. Even knowing that winning or losing in that game has nothing to do with music, when it’s your turn, the pressure hits like, “Do I really have to roll the dice?” Hand-selling CDs isn’t the ultimate answer, of course — but maybe it’s healthier to imagine other ways to share music, ways that honor the experience rather than the count.
Even if some form of “exchange of feeling” exists through streaming, the way music is listened to has changed, and the logic of numbers increasingly dictates what’s considered good or bad in music.
Gomi: Sometimes younger bands come to me, trying to put into words that they want to follow a path like ours. They’ll say things like, “We made a CD… but we’re not sure how to get it out there,” and come by the shop.
It makes me really happy to know they’re paying attention to what we’ve done. But it’s incredibly hard for an unknown band to spread their music, so I always tell them they should definitely put it on streaming. I know that’s probably not the answer they wanted to hear when they came to me.
※The shop he’s referring to is THROAT RECORDS, the record store Gomi runs in Nara.
Gomi: I don’t think anyone can — or should — do things exactly the way we do. It wouldn’t make sense. If I were 18 and starting a band today, I’d put everything on streaming right away, maybe release a bunch of songs at a crazy pace.
Even before the film was made, I was thinking: it’s not about copying our approach. I hope people take the idea behind it and apply it in their own way. If someone came to me asking what to do, and I just told them, “Do it like this,” nothing new would come of it. I hope that’s the part people get from watching the documentary.
