What is HearJapan?
HearJapan is a Japanese MP3 music store.  You can buy the music sold here regardless of your country.  All music is in MP3 format, so you can play it on any modern music player.  You can purchase the music with PayPal or a credit card.  For more information about HearJapan, read about us.

Do you sell CDs?
No, we are a digital only store.  

What is the cat icon?
The cat icon, is a HearJapan feature that let’s you sort through the entire collection of music available at HearJapan.  On the top, there are genres to choose from. By clicking on the triangle next to the genre you can expand the list to see all subgenres.  For the genre that you with to see, just click on the plus sign.  For example, if you click +vocaloid, you can then click -rock.  This will show all vocaloid releases while not showing you any vocaloid releases with a rock sound.  

Below Genre, there are characteristics.  Each characteristic group has a drop down menu like genres.  You can further sort music by adding or subtracting charactistics.  For example, you can click plus “punk”, plus “female vocals” and you will then see all punk bands with female vocals.  

How do I make a purchase?
First, find the tracks or albums that you want to purchase and click the add to cart button (in the case of tracks, it is the “cart” icon).  Once you are done shopping click on the cart icon on the top right of the page you are on.  This will take you to the shopping cart, where after confirming your purchase, click checkout.  This will launch the PayPal payment window to pay for your purchase. If you don’t have a PayPal account, click “Buy As Guest” to purchase with just a credit card.

How do downloads work?
Once you complete your purchase, you are taken to the downloads section.  Your most recent purchases will always be listed first.  You can either download individual tracks from the album or the entire album at once as a zip file.  Your purchase history will be saved so you can come back at any time and re-download purchased tracks in case you lose or break your computer, music player, phone, etc.

What does the star do on album, artist, genre, and label pages do?
The star is our favorites system.  Once logged in, just click the star of any album, artist, genre or label and you will get updates whenever something new is released by them.  To see the updates, just click favorites top bar.

The information for composers, lyricists and arrangers doesn’t seem so accurate, why is this?
The information is 100% accurate. The problem is, often times the name for the composer is just a first name and  a very common name at that.  This results in many composers who go by the same alias.  We provide the feature to see the composer, arranger or lyricist of each track (click the show more button on the album page) so users can find out what other songs the composer wrote.  This works great for most names, but it will cause duplicates in more common names.  HearJapan does not touch this data at all and it is there as is.  

Why can’t I write a review for albums that I purchased elsewhere?
We only allow users who purchased the items on HearJapan to review so that we can guarantee that there are no fake reviews and more importantly no spam.
If I make a playlist does that make it public?
All created playlists are publicly visible.

What can I do with the Japan map?
You can see what artists reside in what areas of Japan.  You can also circle into a city like Osaka and see what J-pop, Visual kei, or Metal are based there.