quality:corruption
Emergence of Japanese rock and electronic music

Rock music remained a relatively underground music genre in the early 1970s in Japan, though Happy End managed to gain mainstream success fusing rock with traditional Japanese music. Several Japanese musicians began experimenting with electronic music, including electronic rock. The most notable was the internationally renowned Isao Tomita, whose 1972 album Electric Samurai: Switched on Rock featured electronic synthesizer renditions of contemporary rock and pop songs. Other early examples of electronic rock records include Inoue Yousui 's folk rock and pop rock album Ice World (1973) and Osamu Kitajima 's progressive psychedelic rock album Benzaiten (1974), both of which involved contributions from Haruomi Hosono, who later started the electronic music group "Yellow Magic Band" (later known as Yellow Magic Orchestra) in 1977.

In 1978, Eikichi Yazawa 's rock single "Jikan yo Tomare" ("Time, Stop") became a smash hit that sold over 639,000 copies. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of Japanese rock. He sought worldwide success, and in 1980 he signed a contract with the Warner Pioneer record company and moved to the West Coast of the United States. He recorded the albums Yazawa, It's Just Rock n' Roll, and Flash in Japan, all of which were released worldwide, but were not very commercially successful. Keisuke Kuwata formed the rock band Southern All Stars (SAS), which made their debut in 1978. Southern All Stars remains very popular in Japan today.

In the same year, Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) also made their official debut with their self-titled album. The band, whose members were Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto, developed electropop, or technopop as it is known in Japan, in addition to pioneering synthpop and electro music. Their 1979 album Solid State Survivor reached number one on the Oricon charts in July 1980, and went on to sell two million records worldwide. At around the same time, the YMO albums Solid State Survivor and X∞Multiplies held both the top two spots on the Oricon charts for seven consecutive weeks, making YMO the only band in Japanese chart history to achieve this feat. Young fans of their music during this period became known as the "YMO Generation" (YMO世代, YMO sedai). YMO had a significant impact on Japanese pop music, which started becoming increasingly dominated by electronic music due to their influence, and they had an equally large impact on electronic music across the world. Southern All Stars and Yellow Magic Orchestra symbolized the end of New Music and paved the way for the emergence of the J-pop genre in the 1980s. Both bands, SAS and YMO, would later be ranked at the top of HMV Japan 's list of top 100 Japanese musicians of all time.