I was really surprised to see a post about Hatsune Miku on Slashdot today. I run a worldwide digital music store for Japanese music called HearJapan. We work directly with Crypton Future Media and have released over 300 vocaloid releases. I sell a lot of Japanese music but I think vocaloid is the most interesting. From a business perspective it is great because all of the musicians who write music for vocaloid are amateur musicians and most of them come from the DTM scene (desktop music scene). Because of the popularity of Hatsune Miku the music they create using her voice sells amazingly well. To my knowledge, vocaloid music is the only music that an artist can make and expect to sell a good amount of music without any massive financial backing and a huge corporate orgy. They also embrace a community sharing culture where the song creators will upload their unmastered songs to sites like nico nico douga and have people rate them. They choose the best songs, get them properly mastered and then sell the songs. I also love it from a creative perspective because they write the lyrics through the perspective of these anime characters so there is a lot of creativity. The music itself is incredibly creative and can range from chiptune, to traditional Japanese or from electropop to heavy metal, or from shoegaze to house music. There is a wide variety and for users who haven't heard of this before I recommend you check it out at my site. We have translated all of the artist bios and album descriptions, a great place to start: http://www.hearjapan.com/store/genre/1/74/vocaloid

I am the president of a digital music store specializing in Japanese music called HearJapan. I see piracy destroy my sales on a constant basis. It's difficult getting high sales when most of your customer base are rabid internet users who got introduced to Japanese music through illegal downloads. I actually ran an interesting experiment two years ago that serves as a good example. This is a long message I wrote directed at the fans, but if you have the time please read it as it is very relevant. http://www.hearjapan.com/news/hearjapan_news/A_Message_To_The_Fans

You could always try something different like Japanese music. Hearjapan (.com) has loads of Japanese music non-drm. Really great artistic shit, anyways, check it out if you have the time.