K-ON! Song Stems

Hi there, thanks for your question! I haven't heard of this before so of course I had to go do some digging on the subject. While I couldn't find the song itself, I'd like to document my findings here.

On October 13th 2020, a song called Second Guess was uploaded to Spotify and attributed to Hokago Tea Time. The Spotify artist profile for this song does not appear to be the same as the official Hokago Tea Time profile, however because they have the same name, I'm guessing Spotify got confused and lumped the two together.

The track went largely unnoticed until the following Friday, the 16th of October, when Spotify's Release Radar playlist got updated. This is a dynamically generated playlist showcasing new releases from artists that the user has shown interest in. As modern day algorithm-powered technology is far from flawless, this song started appearing in the Release Radar playlists of users who listen to the real Hokago Tea Time. That's when people started to take notice, and a few posts and blog articles were written about it (in Japanese). It was quickly dismissed as having nothing to do with the actual band.

While the single is still present on Spotify, it has been made unavailable in all regions, so there's no way to access the song there. It amassed a play count of 63,982 plays before playback was disabled, so it did reach a fair amount of people. The cover artwork is fanart of the manga Spy × Family, and it was made by an artist named mr milktea (who makes some fantastic art, by the way).

It's pretty safe to assume that the uploader simply stole someone else's song and tried to pass it off as a Hokago Tea Time song, for whatever reason. Music theft and misattribution is far from uncommon on platforms like Spotify, and it's a real struggle for lesser known independent artists to try to combat it, as copyright laws and content ID tools are largely designed to serve wealthy rightsholders as opposed to individual creators.

Oh hey, I almost forgot about this blog. :v

Here’s some footage from my visit to Toyosato Elementary School (the real-life K-ON school)! I have a lot more, but Tumblr’s upload limit is pretty restrictive...

Found a Yui-branded Les Paul on Yahoo Auctions the other week, decided to pick it up! It’s not really in perfect condition, so I’ll be bringing it to a guitar shop for some maintenance soon.

Experimenting with training a neural network to detect K-ON! characters in images.