When I was in Japan, second hand from my city’s local store (a bunch of Western music in the lot too!) and Book-Off. Since coming back, I am mostly buying digital like. The main hurdle is with major labels, when you don’t have a Japanese credit card.
Major labels
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First, check Amazon Music for my local store (because Amazon Music Japan has it all, but it doesn’t accept European credit cards). Artist/album must be present, but it’s not enough! You need the Purchase options > MP3 download to be present and not greyed out. If so, you can use it to buy the digital tracks; and yes, it’s still MP3, so it may not fit your needs.
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At this step, I used to go to Recochoku, the only store I had found so far that accepted European credit cards (and it’s hires). Turns out they started rejecting them somewhere between January 2022 and June 2023.
So I’m now switching to ototoy, which is also hires (technically I didn’t try my credit card directly, but my PayPal account linked to a European credit card worked). With their English website, it seems like they are taking foreign customers into account. Of course, the region lock makes you wonder (are they specifically targeting foreigners living in Japan?!), but unlike credit card, this is easy to bypass without needing a friend on the premises. In the end, the first store that takes my money, gets my money.
I also heard iTunes / Apple Music store was great, and others above mentioned it too. I wasn’t interested because I thought it was bound to iTunes, which I used to love on Macbook but found meh on Windows; turns out it’s not, and there’s even an open source Apple Music client named Cider that runs on Linux (it’s only Cider 1 and is not updated anymore, though, so let’s hope it stays compatible with the store; there is still a premium Cider 2 that runs on Windows). And since I’m interested in getting the actual audio file, once I’ve downloaded it, it doesn’t matter.
EDIT: I just remembered what I was afraid of was the need of Japanese credit card again (otherwise, you need to buy JP gift cards, and I’ve read the usual stores were out of stock). If you’re lucky and the artist is registered on your regional store, you may not need this… But I’ll let @blossomingRuin and @Demivee give us more info about this.
Indie
Mostly Bandcamp, also great for instrumentals, fan game track covers, etc.
Hybrid platforms
I looked at Qobuz, a hybrid streaming/purchase platform which is French, but bought e-onkyo so I was expecting more and more Japanese bands to come. So far though, they seemed quite occasional. Selection seems peculiar. Example: I was looking for Nana Mizuki and couldn’t find the main albums, but the anisongs albums were there!
I also started Resonate (https://stream.resonate.coop/) which is about closing the gap between streaming and owning (you have a listening budget, pay very little to listen once, then pay more and more per track, until the cumulated payment makes you actually own the track), but only a subset of indies are there, mostly Western. It seems the list of artists there is complementary with Bandcamp; but I don’t know enough of them to tell what kind of artists go there.
Streaming
Unlike in the 2010s where you had a hard time finding Japanese bands on Spotify, this is not an issue anymore.
I also use AWA a lot on mobile (there is a desktop app on Windows/macOS too). I had to use a VPN for the initial registration, now I don’t need to use it anymore to listen. Since Spotify has a lot of artists now, I didn’t find particular exclusives on AWA; it’s just that the selection is naturally more aimed at Japanese (and Korean) bands, so there’s not a lot of effort to do on the app homepage to find some. And you still have the Western artists. There are some interface issues though, like not being able to play through all the recent artist releases.
I still had to extract audio from YouTube when it comes to anime/game soundtracks that cannot be purchased digitally (or you can only find old second hand discs that are not cheap). But I feel like with ototoy I should be able to at least get all “non-soundtrack” tracks.
My biggest issue now is the price. Major label tracks are 2x as expensive as an indie track, so I just buy a “major label” album once in a while, and stream the rest. Unfortunate, considering I buy 10x more on Bandcamp, if other tracks were cheaper, they’d still get 5x more money from me.