Hiroshi Yoshimura (吉村弘)

I'm guessing that traditionally, major labels in Japan have reasoned that we wouldn't be interested in Japanese language music unless it was so big and zeitgeisty that it could be worth a try to break that barrier, like YMO, but even YMO had brief and limited success. The language barrier was probably much more of an issue back then.

maybe, though I think the vast majority of YMO's lyrics are in English! (outside of Naughty Boys where it's half and half) I think the issue for them was they were marketed in the Western world as being sort of a gimmick band that played into some stereotypes about Japanese people (which, to be fair, YMO were kind of game to play into themselves). I remember speaking to an older record store dude about them who says he definitely remembers them getting hype in the USA but they weren't really marketed like Kraftwerk or other electronic music, rather he spoke of posters with the Xoo Multiplies cover with text that says "They came from Japan...", as though they were space aliens.

of course the appreciation for them *now* seems to be a lot more sincere, and again I'm not exactly sure where it came from, but I think when it comes to Japanese electronic and New Wave pretty much all roads lead to one of the 3 guys (particularly Hosono) so there are dozens of possible answers.

I also think the rise of working-from-home has helped with the ascent of this stuff - it's on Youtube, but it wouldn't be something people would have actively sought out before. Now they're at home working eight hours daily and they don't have the background sound of the office so they search for ambient music that's pleasant and comforting without being distracting.

Mention of ‘Thursday Afternoon’ reminded me of this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04funny_humor.html

paywall

Unhappy Hour By Wendy McClure
June 4, 2006
My boyfriend, Chris, and I were at Rossi's, an amiable dive bar where everything was burnished with nicotine. Except the jukebox. The jukebox was new, and with its cheerful, glowing computer screen, it looked like a particularly glitzy A.T.M. The music didn't come from CD's or records inside the actual jukebox but from an immense database somewhere on the Internet or maybe even outer space.

The place was filling up. Chris grabbed our pitcher and topped off the glasses of our second round. We paused to listen to the song that was just starting. It built up slowly — a low, swelling hum punctuated by simple, tentative piano notes. They went, "Ting. . .ting ting.. . ."

"Didn't someone play this song before?" Chris said.

We waited to hear more of the song. There wasn't more. Just ting and ting. And ting again.

"Before when?" I asked.

"Before, uh. . ." Chris put down his glass to think. So did I. We both got faraway looks in our eyes, spacing out, trying to remember. The song was particularly well suited for spacing out. Ting.

The last jukebox selection we could recall was by Pink Floyd, but that was practically a whole beer ago. This new song, we realized, had been playing ever since, steadily emitting an ambient drone and random tings for nearly 10 minutes now. It sounded like excellent music for floatation-tank therapy. Less so for Miller-Lite-and-video-game therapy, the kind you get at Rossi's.

Chris went and checked the screen. "Well, that explains it," he said. "It's a Brian Eno song." The song was called "Thursday Afternoon."

I don't know much about Brian Eno. I know that he is a highly innovative artist and a very important producer and also that in the 70's, he used to wear a lot of ostrich feathers. I would read later that with songs like "Thursday Afternoon," he was experimenting with what he called a "holographic" style, composed according to mathematical principles, in a series of repeated loops in which each component represents the whole. A whole that does not, technically speaking, rock.

Before long a girl approached the jukebox and peered at the screen.

"Is it stuck?" she asked no one in particular. "Or skipping, or something.”

She wandered off. The song wandered on.

I poured the rest of our beer. The TV above the bar had "Jeopardy!" on mute, and we tried to follow along. Chris visited the men's room. Chris came back from the men's room.
He said, "The song is still playing." Because it was.

People were turning in their seats to stare at the jukebox and then glance at the Michelob Ultra clock. I read the lips of a woman in conversation across the room; I could definitely make out the words "song" and "my God." The song had been playing for about 25 minutes, sounding exactly the same as it had when it started. Only somehow, paradoxically, worse.

Credit...Illustration by James Taylor
Two college-age guys came up to assess the jukebox grimly, as if they were inspecting a car for damage. "Who played this?" one of them said. "It's like yoga music or something."

They looked around, but out of the two dozen or so people in the bar, nobody owned up to playing a 20-odd-minute yoga song. Which, at this point, was getting to be more like a 30-odd-minute song.

"When's it going to play my stuff?" the other college guy asked. By now this seemed a hypothetical question. Elsewhere throughout the bar, there appeared to be considerably more fidgeting and peeling of beer bottle labels than usual. Darts seemed to miss their target more frequently. Ting. . .ting.
"Weren't we going to get dinner shumwhere?" I said, with difficulty. We were on our second pitcher of beer.

Chris shook his head. "We can't leave." Either he wanted to stay until the end of the song, or else the song was making it physically and inexplicably impossible for us to leave the bar, as in that Buñuel film where nobody can leave the dinner party. Imagine replacing the brass cylinder in a music box with a Möbius strip made from nerve endings, and you might get a sense of how "Thursday Afternoon" felt after 45 minutes. The mood in the bar was approaching that of a hostage crisis.

"I put 10 bucks in that thing," one of the college kids kept saying.

"This isn't right," said an older man near the bar. "This isn't fair."

Four male patrons took it on themselves to investigate the jukebox. They felt along the sides of the machine as if in search of a button or switch. We all watched. "Turn it off!" someone yelled.

"I'm not going to turn it off!" the bartender called out suddenly. Everyone turned to look at her. The room fell silent. "Someone paid money to play that song. So they're gonna get their song," she said, bitterly. "You think I like it when you guys play that head-banger stuff?"
Ting. . . .Ting. The men stepped away from the jukebox. If "Thursday Afternoon" was to last all night, so be it.

After an hour and 50 seconds, the tings tapered off, and then the synthesizer drone ceased. And then a moment of heavy silence, and then scattered applause throughout Rossi's.

We all looked back at the jukebox. Any Song, the screen read. Any Time.

That’s so great. The gym I went to for 6 months had a thing like this and I cued a 1hr of silence track on Spotify because I hate listening to music in the gym lol. Turns out I ruined the whole system, they got rid of the request a song feature exclusively because of the asshole that played hours of silence lol

I was typically the only person in the gym when I did this (small gym, I went at weird hours). I didn’t realise it got added to a playlist until after I started doing it in my defence!

been using his music to get my 6 year old daughter to sleep and it works so well. like in 2 minutes she'll be out. and if I'm not careful I'll fall asleep too.

xp May have told this story before but my friend and I queued up "Too Long" by Daft Punk several times in a bar that was fool enough to have Discovery on their jukebox. I don't think we even got through one listen before the staff skipped to the next song

I think the online Touchtunes ones won't let you play the same song on repeat anymore. or if you do it'll skip them or move them back to the queue or something. it definitely does that if you play a bunch of songs by the same artist.

the one time I got skipped was when I played both versions of "Yeah" by LCD Soundsystem in a row, which is like over 20 minutes in total. it was pretty funny because people were getting upset at the first version for being too long and repetitive, then it stopped and I heard someone go "ok FINALLY" only for the 12 minute remix to kick in, which led to a bartender actually unplugging the jukebox because she didn't know how to skip the song

speaking of LCD this one bar I used to go to had some kind of automatic volume adjustment on their jukebox depending on how loud the actual music was. I think the idea was that recordings from say the 70's or 80's are pretty quiet compared to brickwalled modern stuff and you want them to play at the same volume. but it was a dynamic adjustment so the quiet bits on songs would be very audible. anyway someone (not me) plays "All My Friends" and that beginning piano intro was so loud that it was kind of physically disorienting. like I'm used to shouting through music but those clanging atonal piano chords just stopped all the conversation in the bar. and it felt like it went on forever!

Got away with playing all of “The Diamond Sea” (LP version, not the extended one) in a sports bar in Harrisburg, PA once and it seemed like hardly anyone even noticed.