Hi everyone! Thank you for taking the time to read over some of the changes that will be occurring in the 2018 year.
We want to start by thanking all our listeners for supporting Japan Top 10 in the 2017 year (or earlier, if you been a long time listener). We accomplished a lot of great things in 2017 and we look forward to working hard in 2018 to have even more great things completed.
To start off, one of the biggest changes will be the scheduling of our seasonal specials. We will no longer have seasonal specials due to the challenges faced by our staff with completing all of them within a small duration of time. Instead, we will now have these specials spread out throughout the year. We will be introducing them once every other month, on the month that currently does not have a special episode released. It will not be replacing any top 10 episode, thus it will be considered a bonus episode for that month. This is how our schedule will look like in a broad sense:
Month 1 (with 4 calendar Wednesdays): Artist of the month, top 10 episode, special episode
Month 2 (with 4 calendar Wednesdays): Artist of the month, top 10 episode 1, top 10 episode 2, special episode
And then the pattern will repeat itself with month 1 again.
The 2 top 50 specials that are released in a year will continue to run around the same time period as they do currently; no changes will be made there (the one released in the summer will be specially themed one while the other released at the end of the year will be an end of the year top 50 themed episode). Also, bonus specials such as the “My favorite songs of this year” themed episodes will continue to be released in congruency with the timing at the end of each year.
In the end, there will approximately be about 9-10 special episodes released each year, which is pretty much the same amount of extra specials that was currently released in 2017 and the years before, if the winter and summer time specials were all combined together. Thus, we won’t be reducing any content to our podcast as a result of this change; it really is just modifying the timing and the release of how these specials are arranged.
For all details on these schedule changes, please see our schedule page located here.
A great positive change in 2018 for in our Patreon club is that our Premium Plus donors will now have access to our podcast scripts, for all of our current and upcoming podcast scripts. Get more out of our Patreon program by viewing what songs we have in store for an episode, along with all the informative commentary we work hard on producing for all our listeners to enjoy. You will be able to get access ahead of time on what music we will be featuring on an upcoming episode or you can read over our facts from an episode that was just released. Find out how you can become a Premium Plus donor by clicking here.
The other change that will be noticed in 2018 is that we will be introducing more contests into 2018! We have a contest currently planned and details will be released soon, but we hope you the listener can participate in them! The new contests we are introducing are not just ballot entry contests, but actual interactive games that will be fun to listen to and participate in! Once we have sorted the details, we will release more details in the coming weeks and months.
Those are all the changes that we have planned so far for 2018. We may have more in the coming months, but we will make sure to keep the communication open so that all our listeners will be aware of what is going on with the podcast.
More information about our 10th year anniversary is here:
Thanks every! Happy holidays and have a great start to the new year.
Your Japan Top 10 Management team,
December 2017