Life is full of surprises. Some make you poop your pants in terror; others make you pee your pants in glee. This falls somewhere in between because I’m not soiling myself, okay? I’m just excited.

Yes after well over a year of never, ever having live video of their performances available online, Bokura no Oyugi followed up those earlier entries with:

Terror quotient: Falling

That’s a little bit different than the last couple! This is more like if the Vandals were writing idol music. Or Modern Baseball, if you’d prefer a band that’s actually contemporary.

In this case, if you’ll indulge me (it’s my HTML, damn it): Why is there resistance among some idols to allow live video online? I get that you may want to have control over the flow of your content onto the big, bad Information Superhighway, so you want to keep randos away from the process of uploading your stuff, but I think all of the data show that having your material online, one way or another, is just a net win. Do you maybe lose some control over it, and thereby arguably lose out on some revenue? Sure. But then you get that back (hand over fist, I’d wager, even for the lower rungs of the ladder) by generating exposure and monetizing your official content.

And for somebody like Bokurano, who I’m fairly sure are self-produced (or produced by some combination of Mickey and Ruru), that stuff really matters. Idol’s a low-margin business proposition for most everybody involved, so why not maximize the opportunities for people to directly and indirectly give you money?

Maybe the mindset’s different, I don’t know. You could say “well maybe they don’t care about that Maniac! and maybe you sniff your own farts!” to which I’d retort: I mean, they-writ-large definitely do care; they wouldn’t sell CDs and have official videos and official channels and stuff if they didn’t. But maybe some people consider it gauche to be too much of an Internet try-hard.