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| Keith Cahoon was born and raised in Northern California, and began buying records obsessively from the fourth grade. He first entered the music business as a clerk at Tower Records in Stockton, California in 1977, and moved through the company ranks until landing as CEO of Tower Records Japan in 1984. Under his leadership the Japanese company grew to a chain of 58 stores with annual sales of over 50 billion yen. While at Tower he established their free paper Bounce, online retail, record label and music publishing divisions. In October, 2003 Keith founded Hotwire Inc., a Tokyo based music publishing company and consultancy, where he works with a wide range of artists and companies. He has written about music for CD liner notes, and for variety of publications, including Pulse and Rolling Stone. Keith currently maintains a music news website in Japanese at www.hotwirejapan.com. |
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| Floored as a kid by the Beatles' Revolver, Bill has been obsessed with music ever since. He first moved to Japan in 1989, where he worked on the JET Programme, and later at Doshisha and Ryukoku universities in Kyoto. After returning to the United States and obtaining a master's degree in East Asian Studies, he moved to San Francisco and founded Lexicon International, a provider of Japan-related services. In 2001 he returned to Japan as General Manager for online Asian entertainment retailer YesAsia.com, and is presently with Amazon Japan, where he remains closely connected to the music industry. As a freelancer, Bill has written for advertising and creative agencies in Japan, and translated between Japanese and English in multiple disciplines. |
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| Steve, who hails from Vancouver, Canada, was first exposed to Japanese music at the tender age of four, when his aunt gave him a Japanese children's record as a souvenir of her trip to the land of geisha and cherry blossoms. But it wasn't until he found a copy of Osamu Kitajima's "Benzaiten" album in a used-record store in Vancouver while he was in college that his interest in Japanese music started to get serious. By that time McClure was an avid music fan and an aspiring journalist, making his debut as a music writer with a review of George Harrison's 1974 Vancouver concert in his high school newspaper. After graduating from the University of British Columbia in political science and French in 1982, he started working as a reporter for a local weekly newspaper in Vancouver and has worked as a writer ever since. In 1983 Steve moved to the U.K., where he worked as a copywriter and journalist until his itchy feet caused him to buy a one-way Aeroflot ticket to Japan in 1985. He found work at the English-language Japan Times in Tokyo, and soon began writing stories about the Japanese music scene. In 1991 McClure became music trade magazine Billboard's Japan correspondent and is now Billboard's Asia bureau chief. In 1998 his Nippon Pop, the first book in English about Japanese popular music, was published. Besides writing for Billboard and various other publications, McClure also works in TV and radio. |
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