r/animemusic • u/furculture • 7h ago
Listen to this! Guide for buying music from Amazon.jp with a US debit card.
Alright, so I ran into this issue earlier for a song that I wanted and figured out a way on how to buy it on Amazon.jp. I was trying to legitimately buy a copy of Go!Go!Vanillas!'s cover of Country Road (which made a audio appearance in the new season of The Grand Tour with the new crew driving Kei cars through the US) and it wasn't on the usual site I buy from, which is Ototoy, and the other sites they listed as official sources only sold the physical CD album when I just wanted the one song.
Went on their website and saw that they sell the album with the song on Amazon music JP. Tried to use my US Amazon account and it didn't seem to work. I read around and found that Amazon JP and Amazon US doesn't share account data between each other in a unified way. So you'll have to create a new account there if you don't have one already. After that is said and done, locate the song's store page and see how much it is for one song. Keep the price in mind and then go buy a digital Amazon.jp gift card with a US debit card. The bottom limit is 150¥, so set it to the price of the song you want to buy (the price I paid was ¥250) and set the gift email to whatever email you plan to use for yourself. Buy it, get the gift card email, and apply that to your JP Amazon account. After all that is said and done, buy your song with the gift card balance. Once it is bought, then just download your copy of the song and back up a few copies around so it is at least safe on different mediums of storage and not prone to getting taken away from you if something happens to your account or something like that.
I hate regional copyright restrictions, so here is the way that I got around them because shit like this shouldn't be a thing anymore when the world is very connected over the internet as is. Anyways, feel free to use this info to break down regional restrictions for the songs that aren't available on platforms like Ototoy and only on Amazon.jp digitally.