Doujin music history

I came across this lengthy study about the development of DTM("Desktop Music") culture with MIDI. Let me write about the history of MIDI music and its development into doujin music as I understand it.
http://www.geocities.co.jp/MusicStar-Piano/5159/study/soc/contwrt1.htm

The Japanese MIDI protocol was developed in 1983 in order to standardize communication between synthesizers and computers, to ease the work of musicians. In the 1980's, music composed with computers was often done in MML - essentially a programming language for music, used in BASIC computers. To combine the use of computers and synthesizers, computer-savvy personnel were needed, and adapting the new MIDI standard were too mostly musicians already invested into computer language, which meant that use of MIDI was confined within a limited subset of Japanese musicians. Though MIDI was a standard in definition, more and more artists saw it as a genre of its own, and considered music made with MIDI separate from other music genres, even within the use of computers. The MIDI data, sets of instructions for the operation of instruments, was not designed with consumer usage in mind: because it did not contain sound data, but only instructions, it played differently on each computer, which made it inconvenient for sharing around, making the majority of MIDI listeners their own composers. The data was also too large in size to be able to reliably transfer around with the online services of the 1980's. In 1991, the General MIDI standard was published, which allowed simultaneous instrument channels and notes per channel. With improvements in technology, MIDI music was gradually becoming easier to produce, but having been the realm of computers meant that more often than not, new users were not necessarily musicians, but rather computer geeks. The pre-Internet platforms Nifty Serve BBS and Grassroots BBS allowed exchange of MIDI data between people: adaptations of Japanese music of all types. Though not all of them were loyal to the source material, they were grouped under the umbrella term "arrangements". The new crowd of computer geeks was one living among computers in the outskirts of society - the investment of their time and money in computer equipment split them away from the main culture of honest salarymen. They were mostly male, between their late teens to the late twenties, and aside from computer programming, they were also into video games.

Having little prior experience in music and having mostly been influenced by game music, MIDI as a genre was beginning to receive a secondary definition as "game music". Though the composition was amateur, it often paid homage to the sounds of professional composers for video games. With the popularization of CDs for audio storage, amateur musicians could feasibly record the sounds of their own machine sets and distribute their music. The earliest known pressed CD is the 1990 "MCMLXC"(1) by SYNERGY MUSIC NETWORK, a collection of tracks by video game composers as well as amateur musicians. Some of them found later fame, others briefly appeared in the subsequent 1991 "MCMXCI"(2) then vanished. These original music albums were almost entirely instrumental, but included vocal tracks as well. Shinji Hosoe formed the label "Troubadour Records", a commercial channel for the expression of sounds influenced by game culture, starting with "Be filled with feeling"(3) from 1992 and "Great Wall"(4) from 1993. In the early 90's, most sharing of MIDI music was still mostly MIDI data in bulletin board services, some on floppy discs. Few groups recorded their music onto CDs. With the advent of the Internet in 1995, and the transition from PC-98 and other DOS and BASIC systems to Windows, the MIDI composer community experienced rapid growth. It was easier than ever to communicate with one another online, allowing people to eventually set up their personal websites and host their own BBS. During this time, many different amateur groups found the opportunity to move their works from the MIDI format into digital recordings, and give expression both in original music(for example, mplayers record's "junk.test 通" from 1995) and arranged music(Whoopee!records's "Whoopee!pieces01" from 1996). In the latter's case, the CDs were contracted with JASRAC, Japan's largest copyright collection agency - perhaps to avoid litigation from arranging themes from popular anime. Websites dedicated to the collection of information about MIDI arrangements came into existence, for example "GameMusicLibrary"(5) and "ya-su's Park"(6), and artists often linked their friends and influences on their own websites. The hobbyist musicians of the early 90's transformed into doujin music circles, and the freedom of expression and communication allowed collaborations between distant artists. MIDI data was converted into WMA and MP3 formats, which allowed it to be played on modern computers as the composers and arrangers envisioned, and thus shared online - sometimes these demo tracks, other times they were snippets of all tracks joined together - what we know as crossfade demos.

In 1997, JASRAC put limitations on the use of MIDI, in an attempt to cull reproduction of copyrighted music in MIDI format. This made the use of MIDI less attractive, and by 2000, it was mostly phased out of use. In the latter half of the 90's, artists would sometimes host the MIDI data for their music on their websites due to its relative small size at the time. For example, ARM's "valley" section of his website "Cham's Forest"(7)(which will be shut down at the end of this March with the rest of Geocities) includes MIDI format tracks for compositions he later adapted into his first album, "armED chiLD"("DAUERND" and "LIMIT" in NG, among others). It was still not common practice to create original vocal tracks and vocal arrangements until the end of the 1990's. Earlier that decade, the production of bishoujo games(dating-sims and eroge) faced rapid expansion. Titles like Konami's "Tokimeki Memorial"(1994), ELF's "YU-NO"(1996), Leaf's "ToHeart"(1997), Tactics's "ONE"(1998) and Key's "Kanon"(1999) swept the hearts of game enthusiasts one after the other, captivating the Japanese otaku community with "moe" - feelings of having the heart moved by a maiden's character. These titles often had lengthy, varied soundtracks, and their moving plots prompted doujin musicians to create albums in their name, bringing forth many different arrangement albums("the edge of the world" from IOSYS's 2002 "Girl Game CD2"(8)), as well as original image albums. The MIDI format, turning into somewhat of a relic, was sometimes included in the CD releases as an extra, along with album artwork and artist commentary. Such CDs were called "Mixed Mode CD", including both audio tracks as well as data. In some cases, additional doujin material was included - "CGI", referring to digital artwork, as well as short novels. The vocal tracks in arrangement and image albums reproduced the atmosphere of the bishoujo games, with romantic, heartful and girly themes, often walking in the footsteps of the original themes. Vocal arrangements of source-material vocal themes were often adapted without changing the lyrics - for example, "Brand New Heart" from "ToHeart"(9) as compared to the IOSYS adpatation in "Girl Game CD2"(10). Female vocalists, which were until that point mostly outside the male-dominated hobbyist musician scene, frequently appeared as guests for the albums of the larger circles, often under aliases. They were at the time few in number, and the majority of works were solely instrumental. Only as time drew close to year 2000, arrangement and original image albums focusing on vocal tracks began appearing. The circle Eterna Musik, formed by Kotono, was a platform for some of the doujin musicians of the time to join together their works. Though there was significant interaction through the Internet, the scale was still minor compared to doujin music today. Few live performances of instrumental MIDI tracks and vocal tracks were done in the latter half of the 90's, with meager audiences in the dozens in number. Sale numbers for units sold in Comiket(and later M-3) were at the couple-hundred at best, often much lower. The number of doujin circles participating in Comiket and M-3 was rising from several dozen in 1998 to over a hundred in 2000, though there were more circles solely sharing MIDI data online.

With the opening of year 2000, most circles were still active, but over the few next years, their majority would put aside their participation in doujin music and become once again part of the mainstream Japanese culture. Their websites would move domains or close down, and they would shift into the more modern and orderly blog format, often abandoning their aliases in favor of new ones, or simply exposing their real names. Though not all of them are as active as they were in the past, they've found ways in which they can still interact with their old friends, with mass social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The wave of bishoujo game arranged and original image songs dissipated as time drew near the mid-2000's, in favor of original music as well as arrangements of the Touhou Project games' soundtrack. The MIDI data format is nowhere to be seen, and the decrepit websites are almost all completely gone, along with their included MIDI tracks. Cultural shifts in the otaku community caused by the rise of textboard 2channel and imageboard Futaba Channel in the early 2000's, as well as flash videos in the early 2000's(for example, "Oniichan doite! Soitsu korosenai!"(11) from 2003) and website Nico Nico Douga in the mid-late 2000's, brought change to how doujin music was shared among fans. Though it was still sold as album CDs in doujin events as ever, doujin music's roots in MIDI, BBS and bishoujo games were swiftly replaced with new influences, and its recorded history was gradually taken down with the aging 90's-period websites. IOSYS as a most prolific doujin music circle in 2019 forms a great example of how influences changed over time: MIDI data tracks in 1998-2000("armED chiLD"(12)), bishoujo game arrangements in 2001-2002, 2channel culture and slang influenced vocal tracks in 2003-2005("Saitama Payapaya"(13), "Itteyoshi 2005"(14)), Touhou Project arrangements 2006-. The early 2000's period was a transition period for doujin music to adapt to modern times, and also for the composition within it to change.

Denpa music as we know it today was formed in that period: a mix of moe characterization from arrangements and image songs, Akihabara-originated otaku music like Under17 and MOSAIC.WAV, 2channel/Nico Nico Douga influenced Internet culture as well as radio comedy skits. Ultimately, denpa hasn't changed between 2009-2019 in the same way as it had between 1999-2009, nor as it had between 1989-1999, but the road of denpa is a topic for another day. I hope you've had a good read.



Links
(1) MCMLXC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpYppJyxkts
(2) MCMXCI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmHG3rkCoQk
(3) Be filled with feeling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGqN26UxkG4
(4) Great Wall - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpM4c8vXVPg
(5) GameMusicLibrary(viewed through webarchive) - http://www.dd.iij4u.or.jp/~taisho/
(6) ya-su's Park(viewed through webarchive) - http://www.ne.jp/asahi/ya-su/park/galall.html
(7) Cham's Forest, Valley section - http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown-Dice/4515/valley.htm
(8) the edge of the world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scXtk5hUVfU
(9) Brand New Heart(ToHeart opening theme) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1dOYuPm-AM
(10) Brand New Heart(IOSYS ver.) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCfcAatSFMk
(11) Oniichan doite! Soitsu korosenai! - http://www.geocities.co.jp/HeartLand-Icho/3736/doite.swf
(12) armED chiLD - https://open.spotify.com/album/6M8G4NGoOBsCZ8Xir8LWgk
(13) Saitama Payapaya - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqEsD1WKfys
(14) Itteyoshi 2005 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtdyoray4fo