Shan Rauf

How I discovered kyooo

Date published: Aug 3, 2025

A few months ago, YouTube recommended me "When summer comes" by kyooo:

"When summer comes" by kyooo (「夏がくれば」 or "Natsu ga kureba" by キョー)

I like the song! The vocals and whistling are soothing and the melody is nice. Overall, I like this genre of music; other examples in this style are The Night (Lovewave), Reflection Eternal (haruka nakamura), and in your arms (saib), which was sampled from fly away (장윤주).

Interestingly, all of these songs and most other music I like and listen to these days were introduced to me by YouTube recommendations. And an interesting thing about these recommended videos is that they're often reuploads of the original songs (i.e. the recommended video was uploaded by someone other than the original musician).

A few YouTube channels like this exist on YouTube (e.g. Inspira and Voiced Out); many of their videos are reuploads of obscure, indie songs (often Japanese or Korean) where the original songs are on Soundcloud or sometimes seemingly non-existent when doing a surface-level Google search. And the thumbnail is almost always some anime-like illustration from pixiv.

Screenshot showing Inspira's channel page on YouTube

Without these reupload channels, I would never discover this great music, so I'm happy they exist. Others online have written about the effect of "curator" roles in creative scenes, so I won't rehash those ideas here.

One thing I noticed with this song in particular was that an original upload of the song from kyooo doesn't seem to exist anywhere on the internet! It looks like kyooo only has an early demo (July 13, 2012) and a live performance (September 28, 2013) of the song on Soundcloud.

So where did the official, "studio-recorded" song even come from and how did it end up accessible on the internet? My guess: kyooo used to sell CDs for her albums, and they currently seem out of stock everywhere they're listed, but presumably some people bought the song's album CD (屋上から) when first released on August 27th, 2014.

The video YouTube recommended me was from Inspira, who uploaded the song on September 30th, 2016, but actually the first instance of the song that I could find is from someone named "tanassin", who uploaded the full album to YouTube on August 13th, 2016. It's hard to tell, but I think this "tanassin" person might be just some guy uploading albums he likes onto YouTube. Presumably he bought kyooo's CD when it was in stock, and then he uploaded the tracks to YouTube. He seems to have good music taste! (he introduced me to this song ナ・ララ by ふちがみとふなと)

So kyooo's official songs would have never existed on the internet if tanassin had not reuploaded them (assuming that kyooo hasn't posted the songs anywhere else and that all the copies of the song trace back to tanassin's upload). At most, there would be the 45-second previews of each song that you can listen to on some sites that list the album CD.

And without the reuploads, I doubt all of these people would have discovered and sampled the song (1, 2). That serendipity and chain of events feel meaningful in some way... It shows the power of the internet I guess, that I could discover a nice song from an album released 11 years ago because a random person decided to reupload it.

It's possible that kyooo actually wanted to keep the official songs restricted to her CD (to encourage sales, for example), hence why no official upload from her exists. I can't tell if that's true or not, but... I do want to buy the CD or tip some money, but it seems out of stock everywhere and she doesn't seem to accept tips...

A related thing I wanted to mention is that I feel sad when people seemingly disappear from the internet (e.g. indie musicians who post some great music and then seemingly disappear without an obvious explanation). Visa has a Twitter thread related to this:

Screenshot of the first tweet in Visa's thread about the lifecycle of many people on the internet

I'll write more about that topic some other time. If you like kyooo's music, here's a playlist of some of her live performances:

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