Back in 2008 I was very heavily in to power metal and blown away by Dragonforce (ironically they’re a group I don’t enjoy anymore) and I needed more of that genre, stumbled upon X Japan and fell in love, went even further down the rabbit hole and found Hide’s solo stuff which I still regularly listen to now.
Although I like a lot of different groups I’m still trying to branch out but there is just too much Visual Kei.
I remember Kuroshitsuji Season 2 was aired when I was just about to go to the university, my classmates were super hyped and I just meh, another good anime huh. (it’s normal for a language major full of girls… our class only had four boys including me…) but when I saw the OP, Shiver, I was shocked cuz I just became a fan of The Gazette about two months ago before that, then I also became “hyped” lol. embarrassing haha.
the history happened again when ViViD’s Blue became a new OP of Bleach… lmao
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i am always impressed how so many still remember how they got into anything.
I remember i got from anime openings into Visual kei somehow. But i can’t tell you anymore which one was my first song. It should have been somewhere around 2006/2007.
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I’m gonna wager a guess and say “The World” by Nightmare? I can’t help but feel that was one of the big VK anime openings.
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I’d love to tell you, but i really have no idea anymore
My first japanese songs was ayumi hamasakis real me and step you, thats what i remember, but afterwards there is a hole (i have a mental illness and i start to suspect thats the reason i have holes in my memory for certain stuff, sorry)
But i really have no idea what my fist VK song was 
Like a lot of other people here, I got into vk around 2006/2007. Like @knn, I think I saw An Cafe’s PV for Escapism embedded on someone’s profile on GaiaOnline lol. And then Death Note’s OP with Nightmare’s THE WORLD of course. I had already been listening to J-pop since I was little (I’m 26) so I was already familiar with Japanese music through anime and stuff so it was easy for me to get interested in vk haha. It all went from there and I just went on a Youtube rabbit hole of low quality PVs and blogspot downloads and Livejournal communities and all that. Oh and Batsu . org if anyone used to go on there!
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Someone posted Gackt’s “Another World” on an anime forum years ago. I had only ever heard J-pop by way of anime OPs/EDs at the time and I was one of those bland gamer kids who thought music was a “waste of time” because I’d “rather be gaming” (looking back…this made no sense). I guess my general curiosity was from never having heard Japanese rock before and as a super-weeb the idea of Japanese music just piqued my interests in a way Western stuff never had. Jammed it, enjoyed, and went on a Napster/Limewire/whatever was circulating then spree of downloading whatever else I could find. Moved on to research further via Jpopmusic forums and then just…soaked up as much as I could.
Ironically, I was incredibly adverse to VK at first as I was super Christian growing up and it seemed “questionable” to my extremely boring sensibilities. That being said, I was sold on it after a few DEG tracks and became a full-time VK devotee for awhile. Good times.
My friend showed me something by Alice Nine and I was curious but they were my vkei dealer for a long while, until they told me their sources and I quickly fell in love with Psycho le Cému and DEG so when PlC broke up like a week after i mentioned that they were my fave, I was on the hunt for more so eventually I had a small collection of burned CDs that held me over for a while, until I discovered scape through a podcast and MM. After that I was into the scene and absorbed it all like a sponge, and a friend there introduced me to THE ALFEE which is still one of my favorite bands, and to Toshihiko Takamizawa whose releases I still follow closely. I really loved Közi and Moi dox Mois, to the point that I got into gothi
lolita despite being fluffy and a bit broke lmao. After I graduated, I wasn’t around as much but I had a mahoosive collection of angura kei, various flavors of metal, MM and MM adjacent projects, and a bunch of rare punk stuff that I enjoyed until my laptop of the time died a very untimely death. So from there I’ve been listening to a lot of older classics and streaming stuff on spotify if it’s there.
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It was around 2010 and I had been listening mostly to black metal and grindcore for along time, but I was getting kinda bored of it. I had a tumblr blog where I shared the music I was into with other people, and someone I followed posted the video for Dolei by The Piass. I loved the guitar solo, so I googled the band and sought to learn more about this visual kei thing. The first band I came across was An Cafe and I despised it at first lol, but I kept hearing them in my head so I kept going back to their youtube PV’s. Eventually I was able to shed my angsty kvlt roots and admitted to myself that it was okay to love oshare kei lol
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soooooo back in 2008 i was a 10th grader, living in a godforsaken village, where internet access sounded like something from fairy tales (jk but i had to ride 40 mins by bus to the closest city with internet cafe). the only place where i could discover new music on a daily basis was ukranian channel dedicated to alternative rock music. at that time i was into Cinema Bizarre, because they sounded cool and looked very different than other bands i liked. so one day i was just casually watching this channel, hoping for some new video by CB to appear there, and, well, a weird song started playing, with no less weird of an intro, that reminded me of horror movies, where a creepy japanese girl was ~playing~ with roots. then the song started playing and it totally blew off my mind both visually and musically.
and that was the beginning of my gazerock era lol
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In 2006 I once saw a youtube video featuring GazettE’s Shichigatsu Youka. Looked into the band themselves and it was literally nonstop from there. Nothing has ever done it for me like VK and that song is still my lowkey favorite for this reason lol!
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It all started in 2008 as far as I can remember. I was in high school back then and heavily into rick and nu-metal. A freind of mine played several J-rock songs for me. Most included Dir en Grey and Gazette. Then I started getting into J-rock and Visual Kei, discovered Sadie, Girugamesh, D’espairsRay etc. But aside that a few months later I heavily ventured into metal area, such as Sex Machineguns, Loudness, Seikima-II and X Japan. And my passion in Japanese music is still going on for 12, almost 13 years straight 
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Oh my god, I completely forgot about Tonberry Torrents. 
I remember I uploaded deathgaze’s first album there.
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It was around 2013/14 I think when I was looking for some new Jrock songs and YT suggested DIAURA - Shitsuyoku no Seiikai they had everything I was looking for in a band and thats how I found out about VK
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It was on 2007 when a friend of mine made me listen to An Cafe. I thought it was original and i started to develop an interest and to look for more Vk bands^^ Now i am listening to more brutal bands.
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It was 2002 or something when I signed up to a forum who introduce me to jrock and visual kei too beside jpop. I forgot the name of the forum.
But I always watched anime, so I found japanse music by downloading anime intros. Was around 1999 or so 
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That is sooo true, LOL
I discovered visual kei/jrock in 2011… I was 11-12 years old and in my anime weeb/otaku phase and I came across a picture of bou from an cafe and couldnt believe an actual guy could look that pretty, so I ended up listening to their music and quickly discovered lots of other bands like the gazette, girugamesh, versailles, lareine, malice mizer, dir en grey, and X japan of course the look of the bands was what got me interested but it was the good music that made me stay haha
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I was aware of the existence of japanese music and VK as soon as I started to buy and collect Manga, especially Manga and Anime magazines. That was in the very early 2000s. I didn’t start listening to it though until I found albums by Malice Mizer, Dir en grey and MdM by accident in a local shop that sold CDs in 2003/04. I bought them and I liked the music. Before that I knew a few songs by X, Laraku and Pierrot thanks to Anime OST V.A.s, that mainly featured the original Japanese opening and ending songs.
Then I became rather obsessed with bands such as D’espairsRay and Moi dix Mois. A few years later I got internet at home, I started to order more stuff online and ofc dl some albums, I discovered many 90s bands, like Madeth gray’ll or La’Mule and became obsessed with that. 2007-09 I had a bit of a fall out with VK and japanese music in general, but thanks to MH I got back into it.
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In a chilean channel called ETC., characterized by being a channel where they broadcast animes, they broadcast Japanese songs in their commercials. After watching an episode of Detective School Q in 2009, they played the song “A:FANTASIA” by Nightmare. I loved the song and the style of the band so much that I started to investigate more of them. I found the aesthetic genre to which they belonged: Visual Kei. In it, it was said that there were various subgenres, a style that was characterized by having pop rock songs and happier tunes called my attention a lot: Oshare Kei. Hence, I have not stopped listening to this great genre that captivated my life. 
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