AmPm (starting Medium), self introduction and reasons for starting

We are AmPm, a two-person creative unit.
We debuted in March 2017 with a song called Best Part of Us, which means we are so-called music-based artists, in general perception.
(We’re talking a bit goofy around it, see below).

It has been three years since our debut, and more than anyone or anything else, we are the most surprised.
So far, many people around the world have listened to our songs.
On Spotify alone, we’ve had about 75 million streams. That’s about 14 million people.
It’s a tremendous streams.

| Background before making our debut.

The two of us founded our company in 2015.
This company is an extension of both of our careers, doing general creative production, digital marketing, music production for commercials, and event production with a focus on music.
However, we did not set out to create a company from the beginning, and as a result, the two of us decided to create our own company.
Before establishing the company, the two of us traveled around the world and all over Japan, meeting various creators and musicians, and having many conversations.
At the time, we were both working different jobs, so we used our free time to work and raise money for our travels.

While there are so many wonderful creators all over the world, through repeated conversations, we can see many challenges. Gradually, we begin to see what is required of us.

It was not clear what we should do, but we took the outline of the task back to Tokyo and the first conclusion we came to was to hold a festival to introduce the artists we met.
Organizing a festival requires a certain amount of money and trust to rent a place, so we decided to establish a corporation.
As for the business area, both of us were already working as freelancers, so we started the festival as an extension of that.

We’ll spare you the details of the festival, but from the results, it was a huge loss.
Of course, we received a lot of good feedback from the artists who participated and the audience who came. However, as a matter of fact, the deficit was so large that the newly established company suddenly faced the danger of bankruptcy.

Naturally, we couldn’t just let the company go bankrupt, so right after the festival ended, we worked so hard that we were literally busy, and we were able to avoid bankruptcy. And in the midst of all that busyness, I suddenly had a thought.

We thought “Festival are like fireworks”

The festival that we started as a way to introduce the artists we met in different parts of the world was, when you think about it calmly, a temporary thing, and once it was over, the connection was instantly lost.
Of course, We are sure the audience who came to the festival had a chance to meet artists they didn’t know, but there was something different about it. Maybe there is nothing different to begin with, but there is something missing.
The next conclusion We came to was…

If we had a famous “something”, we could solve these problems faster.

So, we thought of “something” and decided to create an artist.
Fortunately, our company had the know-how to create sound sources, and we could also do creative work. We also had the knowledge to sell it.

Of course, we knew it would not be easy to sell or become famous, but we felt we had no other choice but to create a new artist, and AmPm was born.

| About AmPm

Creating an artist is not an easy task.
Who is going to be the artist in the first place? It’s a normal and frankly real problem to run into.
There’s no point in thinking about it, so we go ahead and start creating sound sources.
We’ve always been producing events, so We are always looking for new artists. Then, while browsing YouTube, We stumbled upon Michael Kaneko.

At the time, he had less than 100 views.
We contacted him via SNS and decided to create a song with him. At the time, we didn’t have an artist name or even a concept, so the song was created to fit our company’s image.
The result was our debut song, “Best Part of Us”.
His original song “Separate Seasons,” sung by Michael Kaneko, was later released as an AmPm Remix in 2018.

The song is ready, but we don’t know the name of the artist or even who will perform it. We can’t remember the timeline now, but anyway, the song was ready, and nothing else was decided.
While We was doing my daily work as a company, We had a chance to go to New York. It was there that I met Sleep No More.
We won’t go into details about Sleep No More (We ended up liking it a lot and have been there many times), but it’s about wearing a mask, becoming something anonymous. We was struck by the fact that there was a way to communicate creativity, regardless of the language barrier.

That’s when the concept of AmPm came to me at once.

・Anonymity of the artists ourselves
・The artist must be in a position to introduce vocalists and producers

These two major concepts are the core of the formation of AmPm. Regarding the first, “the anonymity of the artists ourselves,” visual information has a huge impact, for better or worse, on how we know the artists.
Music seems to transcend borders, but it doesn’t. It’s not like Eminem’s 8 mile, but it is true that there is a kind of invisible racial barrier depending on the genre. We believe that walls can be crossed, but We didn’t think it was necessary to climb them head-on, so We focused on anonymity.

As for the second point, “being in a position to introduce vocalists and producers,” as mentioned above, we have traveled around Japan and abroad and have met many creators and artists.
We genuinely want to introduce them. We wanted to do something with them. We thought it would be good if the artists existed as a format to introduce them.
As We’ve said in interviews, AmPm is a project and a medium. We are not an artist.

| Why start Medium?

From my debut song, We think We used a lot of marketing techniques that not many Japanese artists use.
However, as we all know, the music industry is undergoing tremendous changes at a rapid pace. Those marketing techniques will soon become outdated.

We haven’t talked about these details, but we have mentioned in interviews that we have used such methods in the past, but most of them are old methods now.
However, we were wondering what to do about the situation where people were still referring to the old stories and our own image was not updated with the old information, probably due to the influence of the past interviews still remaining.

Sure, it was true then, but it’s different now.
We explained in detail, but due to the volume of the article, the information was omitted and different nuances were conveyed. The list goes on and on.

Of course, we are very grateful for the interviews, but sometimes they can be a source of misunderstanding. It is a very annoying problem.
Therefore, We had to have a way to communicate properly.

One of the concepts of AmPm is “to be in a position to introduce vocalists and track makers,” and since We believe that AmPm is a project and a media, We thought there are other ways to communicate besides releasing music, so We would like to use this note to communicate.

We’d like to position what We write in this note as AmPm Thinking “SOMETHING NEW”.
We would like to introduce various artists and things related to the music industry from our point of view. “We hope to introduce you to something new from our point of view.

(For now, our goal is to write articles on a regular basis.)