Date: 17 October 2026
The flyer did its job. The information didn't.
Most underground shows in Japan are announced the same way. Someone designs a great flyer, the band posts it to Instagram and X, the venue adds a line to its monthly schedule, and the lineup gets shared around a few group chats. For the forty people who already follow everyone involved, that works. For the person who heard one of your songs last week and types your band name into a search box, it often doesn't. The date, the door time, the price, and the ticket method are sitting inside a JPEG, and a JPEG is a poor place to keep the only copy of anything people need to act on.
This is a field guide for the other side of the counter: bands, small labels, and live houses that want people outside their own circle to find a show, buy a shirt, or understand who they are. None of it needs a marketing budget. Most of it is an afternoon of boring work that keeps paying back every time someone searches. I'll also point to two pages on our sister site MKUltraman, the consultancy I run alongside KAALA, because this is the kind of problem I fix for clients there.
Give every show its own page
The single most useful habit is one stable public page per show, with the event name, date, door and start times, venue, price, and how to get in, written as text. Every flyer post, story, and LINE message should point to that page. Google's own documentation for event pages is blunt about the shape it wants: each event must have its own unique URL, the page should focus on a single event rather than a monthly schedule, and the name, start date, and location must be accurate. If a venue only publishes one long schedule page, the band can still keep its own page per show and link to the venue listing. [1]
There's an honest caveat here. Google's special event search experience is listed for nine regions, from Australia to the United States, and Japan isn't one of them. Adding Event structured data won't, on its own, put a gig at Antiknock into a glossy event panel for someone searching from Tokyo. It still helps: the same page is what overseas fans see when they search from those regions, Google's documentation notes that some ticketing sites already take part in its event experience, and a clean page with readable text is what any search engine, translation tool, or AI assistant needs in the first place. The longer walkthrough on what that page should contain, including bilingual date formats and the station exit, is in MKUltraman's guide to making an event in Japan easy to find in search. [1] [7]
Bilingual means two pages, not two languages on one page
A lot of Japanese band sites try to serve everyone at once: Japanese and English stacked line by line on the same page, or an English menu over Japanese content. Google's guidance runs the other way. It says it works out a page's language from the visible content, not from code-level hints, and recommends one language per page, separate URLs for each language version, and avoiding side-by-side translations. It also warns that translating only the menus and buttons while the body stays in one language can make for a bad experience. [2]
For a band, that means a Japanese page and an English page for each thing that matters: the biography, each release, each show, and the shop. The English version doesn't have to be long. It does have to be real, written for someone who doesn't know what D別 means or which exit to take at Shinjuku. Use the band's romanised name consistently, because overseas fans will search for whichever spelling appeared on the last tour poster they saw. Link each language version to the other so a reader can switch.
Photos need the same treatment. Google says alt text is the most important piece of metadata for an image and that it reads captions and nearby text to understand what a picture shows. A live shot captioned with the band, the venue, and the date is something a search engine can connect to your name. The same shot posted without text is just a dark room with lights in it. [3]
Merch: make the shipping add up before the first order
Bandcamp is still the default shop for a lot of heavy bands, and its help pages are clear about what it does and doesn't do. You set your own shipping price per region, one price for the first item and another for each additional one, and Bandcamp suggests taking real samples to the post office rather than guessing. It tracks stock for you, but if you also sell the same shirts at shows or on another site, you have to adjust the quantity yourself. [4]
The bigger point is that Bandcamp doesn't store, pack, or ship anything. When an order comes in, you get an email and an order page, and the shirt still has to leave your apartment. It lets a fulfilment partner manage orders for a shipping origin, and for runs above about 200 units it offers to introduce you to fulfilment companies. For a band shipping from Japan, that means deciding before release day who packs the boxes on tour weeks, how overseas postage is priced, and what happens when the merch table and the online shop both sell the last XL. [5]
The seller page Japanese law expects
If you sell from your own site rather than a platform, Japan's Act on Specified Commercial Transactions applies to mail order, and the Consumer Affairs Agency's guide says an individual counts as a seller when they sell repeatedly with a profit motive, judged objectively, not by how you see yourself. The listing or shop has to show things such as price including shipping, payment timing and method, delivery timing, the return policy, and the seller's name, address, and phone number. Some of those can be omitted if you clearly offer to provide them promptly on request, but return conditions can't. Without a stated return policy, the default lets buyers cancel within eight days of delivery and send the item back at their own cost. Write the policy down. [6]
This is the dullest page on any band site and one of the most important. It is also where a lot of small shops quietly break the rules by leaving it out, or copy someone else's template with the wrong address in it.
Own the accounts the whole thing runs on
Bands split up, members leave, and the friend who set up the website in 2014 stops answering messages. The domain, the email address that receives ticket and merch orders, the Bandcamp login, and the shop payout account should belong to the band or label, written down somewhere at least two members can reach. A lapsed domain or a mail setup nobody understands can take the whole operation offline at the worst moment, usually the week a tour is announced.
If you want to see where you stand, MKUltraman has a Domain Exposure Check that reads only public records: your email authentication, who your domain is registered through and when it expires, and what your website runs on. The outline is free and the full report with fixes is ¥5,000 plus tax. It is a quick way to find out whether the band's mail domain is set up to prove its messages are genuine before you send the tour announcement. [8]
None of this replaces playing well, booking good bills, and making records people want to own. It just makes sure that when someone does go looking for you, they find the show, the shirt, and the way to pay without having to already know someone in the room.
Sources
[1] Google Search Central: Event structured data
[2] Google Search Central: Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites
[3] Google Search Central: Image SEO best practices
[4] Bandcamp Help: How do I sell merch on Bandcamp?
[5] Bandcamp Help: Can you store and ship my merch?
[6] Consumer Affairs Agency, 特定商取引法ガイド: 通信販売
[7] MKUltraman (our sister site): How to make an event in Japan easy to find in search