The missing playlists, disappearing music videos, and albums that are visible but unlistenable may be understood as a gesture of restoration not only in a time of digital permanence but also in a context of understanding music as commodity rather than experience.
In August 2018, in the midst of a typhoon that had canceled most of my sightseeing plans, I found myself in a darkened lounge somewhere in Naha, Okinawa that was playing a DVD copy of a Namie Amuro concert via projector. She danced and sang across one of the rare blank walls of the restaurant; the rest were covered in various promotional posters and magazine covers depicting her at various ages from her debut as a teenager to her more recent days as a pop star in her forties. This public viewing was not simply background noise to fill the quiet of the restaurant on a rainy night, but was akin to a mourning ritual for the city, province, island, and people that called Amuro one of their own, in the weeks just before her impending retirement.
Amuro, born and raised in Okinawa, is not just a local star but is one of the most prominent artists in East Asian music. Japan’s biggest pop star and a household name across the continent, Amuro sold thirty-six million albums, toured across Asia, and became an iconic figure in pop culture and fashion. After an illustrious career spanning three decades, Amuro announced her retirement on her fortieth birthday. In the following months, Namie would release a three-disc compilation album featuring re-recordings of singles originally released from 1992 to 2017. This compilation album would become Japan’s best-selling album of the 2010s and Amuro would embark on a five-city dome tour in some of Japan’s biggest venues and another shorter tour across Northeast Asia.
And then she vanished. A few weeks after I would leave Naha, Amuro would hold a final commemorative event in Okinawa celebrating her career, then officially retire one day later. Following that final event, her official website, fan club, social media, and online store would close, and Amuro would retreat from the public eye entirely. In late 2023, five years after her retirement from the music industry and her public disappearance, almost all of Namie Amuro’s oeuvre was taken off the internet. Official uploads of her music videos were removed from YouTube, her albums disappeared from online stores, and almost all of her songs vanished from all music streaming platforms with the exception of some collaborations, soundtracks, and features.
Music, for most of human history, had been a performance experience intimately tied to time and place. In some senses, it still is. We attend symphonies in concert halls, go to music festivals in metropolitan parks, and listen to our friends play at open mic nights in local cafés. Versions of such performance experiences have existed in human histories for thousands of years. But the introduction of audio recording technologies in the nineteenth century fundamentally changed how we understand music entirely. Over time, audible music came to be purchasable in the form of vinyl records, DRM-free FLAC files, or 8-track cartridges. With the development, rise, and widespread usage of technologies of recording and listening, music no longer required a performer to exist, only a listener. Though music as performance experience still exists, the vast majority of interactions that people have with music in their everyday lives are not with music as experience, but rather with music as an object.
Music has thus become something that we ourselves can acquire, hold, rip, sample, play, but most importantly and perhaps ultimately, own. However, the traditional forms of music ownership—collections of CDs and cassette tapes, hard drives full of WAVs and MP3s—have in recent years waned with the prominence of streaming: a mid-year report for the Recording Industry Association of America stated that streaming contributed 84% of total recorded music revenues in 2024. While streaming platforms seem to prioritize personalization by allowing us to create playlists, add to our “liked” songs, and download whole albums to our phones, these methods of customization are forms of organization acting as mere illusions of ownership. Playlists are nothing more than folders for sorting the library of someone else that your subscription is letting you access. Users cannot remix songs on Spotify, nor can they sample songs that they have saved on Apple Music. Nothing on streaming platforms is owned. Namie Amuro fans around the world learned this the hard way.
Since her retirement, methods of listening to Amuro have undergone a wide transition. They began as primarily private; listeners accessed her music through personal playlists and collections. However, overtime, her music was circulated publicly or, at least, semi-publicly: fans now upload and stream Amuro’s music on preservation-focused platforms like Internet Archive. But since the sudden, abrupt disappearance of her music from all digital spaces, fans have also taken serious measures to preserve and distribute her music in directly downloadable form. Days after the purge, a friend of mine sent me a magnet link to download Amuro’s complete discography through peer-to-peer file sharing. Several months ago, I also came across a Telegram community meant for sharing Amuro’s discography through cloud-based drive links. As record stores in Japan still seem to have her albums in stock, some fans have bought dozens of physical copies of her CDs only to rip them into digital form once again, while others have slowly been ripping their existing collections for personal use. Namie Amuro—in these public and private collections, in unauthorized uploads of broadcast performances and concerts—can still be accessed through these personal acts of archiving. While these archives hold a precarious position as permanent objects, most demonstrably highlighted in the cyberattacks launched on Internet Archive, the archiving of Amuro’s materials has allowed her fans to revisit her discography in this crowdsourced, alternative manner.
Archiving is an exercise in preservation. It consists of the collection of items which form the historical evidence of activities—of a person, of an institution, of a group, or movement. The archive does not only clarify existence but allows us to understand the past and establish our own existence for the future. It is a technologization of cultural memory, established in the past and extending into the future. But in the digital age, the permanence of archives may also be oppressive, encroaching, and even controlling.
Consider this : what if the mass purging of Namie Amuro’s entire discography was orchestrated by Amuro herself?
It is certainly not out of the question to think so.There are some fans who, on blogs, on subreddits and in Discord servers, whisper that this sudden lack could have been orchestrated by Amuro herself, in a strategic move that would allow her to exercise control over her music and legacy. From the beginning of her career with the group Super Monkey’s in 1992 to 2014, Amuro had been managed by Vision Factory (now known as Rising Production), a Japanese talent agency home to some of Japan’s top stars of the 1990s and early 2000s. However, in 2015, Amuro departed Vision Factory and established her own management company, Stella88, for whom she was the only artist. On her 52-track compilation album, Finally, any and all singles on the album that had been released before 2015, when Amuro had been signed to Vision Factory, featured entirely re-worked arrangements and compositions, as well as Amuro’s re-recorded vocals. It is possible that these newer versions exist because there was some kind of silent struggle with Vision Factory in regards to the rights of these songs —a “Namie’s Version” moment, if you will, that preceded Taylor Swift’s very public feud with Scooter Braun who bought all of her master recordings by three years. If there were, as some fans suggest, continued struggles over ownership between Amuro and her management or record company, perhaps we can conceive of this purge as something more calculated, a removal of her music in order to reassert control over it.
There is a quickly aging adage: the internet is forever. However exaggerated such a saying may be, on a day-to-day basis, it still rings true for most people. From old emails to embarrassing photos from Myspace accounts that you forgot to delete to starving neglected Neopets, past traces of us on the internet remain. While this has been an accepted part of the digital world for quite some time, there has recently been pushback to this digital permanence, as seen through a growing interest and support for what is being called the “right to be forgotten”— the right to have one’s data removed from digital space. There has been (rightful) criticism of this right as being restrictive of freedom of speech and complicating accountability, but desire for this right points to a desire for resistance to the ways in which ordinary people are datafied in our digital lives. But for celebrities like Amuro, they are not datafied by social media posts and profiles, but by their very existence as public figures. This right to be forgotten is a dream for you and me, but an impossibility for Amuro if that was something that she wanted.
What if we consider the case of Namie Amuro’s disappearance as a reconfiguration of an understanding of music that belongs in the distant past. Namie certainly is not dead nor has she completely disappeared from cultural consciousness. She exists in traces: in the gyaru fashion subculture in Japan, in covers of her music by fans on the internet and major studio artists alike, in her challenges to social stigmas as a single mother, in pixelated photos taken of her during rare sightings, in fan-organized events and firework shows held in her honor, in CD collections, music stores, and rental shops. Over time, with the diminishing access to her music, those traces will disappear too. But in a world where music is so often associated with commodity and existence with datafication, is that really something to lament?
What if, instead of a lack, we think of Amuro’s disappearance as a return? Regardless of Amuro’s own possible role in the removal of her music from the internet, if it was enacted by other forces, if it will stay gone forever, or if the songs and albums and music videos will be restored someday, we can perhaps look at this case as something that is more symbolic than a simple disappearance. The missing playlists, disappearing music videos, and albums that are visible but unlistenable may be understood as a gesture of restoration not only in a time of digital permanence but also in a context of understanding music as commodity rather than experience. In a manner of speaking, Amuro has returned us to a past form of listening to music.
In its purging of its recorded forms, the disappearance of Amuro’s music has symbolically become an event again, just as music was an event before recording technologies made it repeatable. Amuro’s discography might have encapsulated the atmosphere of Heisei-era Japan or the atmosphere of Northeast Asia at the turn of the millennium. As it stands today, however, it will never capture the atmosphere of a future place because her music is gone—or rather, it has ended. In its lack of a sustained afterlife, her music has become sound itself—reverberating through our ears then fading away, so that we are now left in the silence of her absence.
Caitlyn Ng Man Chuen is a writer and scholar from the Greater Toronto Area. Her art and research have a commitment to perception, memory, and permanence.
Thumbnail photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash