Why was a 1979 debut single streamed 500 million times on Spotify forty years later? The rebirth of Japanese city pop

Key Points

• “Mayonaka no Door (Stay With Me)” was the debut single of the Japanese singer Miki Matsubara, released in November 1979 when she was 19. It peaked at No. 28 on Japan’s sales chart that year. In 2020 it went viral abroad, and in July 2026 it passed 500 million streams on Spotify, the 10th Japanese-language song to reach that mark and the first Japanese song released in the 20th century.
• The song was designed from the start to sound like Western pop. The producer asked composer Tetsuji Hayashi to set aside the usual conventions of Japanese pop at the time, so Hayashi wrote the melody to the rhythm of English lyrics and left one English line in the chorus: “stay with me.” That makes it easy to get into even for listeners who don’t understand Japanese.
• Its 2020 explosion came from a chain of events: Japanese record labels had been putting old songs on streaming platforms in those years, the Indonesian singer Rainych covered it on YouTube, TikTok videos of “playing this song for my Japanese mom” took off, and in December 2020 it topped Spotify’s Global Viral chart for 18 days in a row.
• Hayashi thinks Western listeners may be drawn to the delicacy and melancholy of Japanese melody. The Western-style rhythm lets foreigners in; the Japanese-style melody makes them stay. The song’s rebirth also showed Japanese record labels the new value of old songs abroad.

On December 10, 2020, a TikTok user posted a video. A line of text on screen read: “I heard that every Japanese woman from the 80s knows this song.” She pressed play, and before the intro had finished, her mother recognized it and started singing along to the chorus.

The video gathered more than 23 million views. Over the following weeks, young people with Japanese roots around the world copied it, playing the same song on their phones for their mothers, aunts and grandmothers and filming their reactions.

The song was “Mayonaka no Door (Stay With Me),” Miki Matsubara’s 1979 debut. When it came out in Japan it did respectably but was no sensation, peaking at No. 28 on the sales chart. More than forty years later, it has been streamed 500 million times on Spotify alone. Only nine Japanese-language songs reached that number before it, and all of them were from the 21st century.

The people who brought the song back were mostly not its original Japanese fans, but young people in Indonesia, the US and around the world. Most of them don’t speak Japanese and never knew Tokyo in 1979. What does it take for an old song to cross a language barrier and move a crowd of strangers forty years later? Half the answer lies in the day it was made.

“Throw out all the rules of Japanese pop”: a bold request in 1979

Miki Matsubara was born in Osaka. Her mother was a jazz singer, and she grew up listening to jazz standards. She formed a rock band in junior high, moved to Tokyo alone in high school to chase her dream of singing, and sang in jazz clubs and on US military bases. She was later discovered at a jazz club in Roppongi by the pianist Jo Sera and signed to the record label Pony Canyon.

In 1979, a Pony Canyon producer asked the composer Tetsuji Hayashi to write a debut song for this newcomer. Hayashi was not well known yet; his first hit, Mariya Takeuchi’s “SEPTEMBER,” had come out only about two months earlier.

The producer’s request was clear: write something that sounds completely like Western pop, and ignore all the elements of Japanese kayokyoku. Kayokyoku was the umbrella term for mainstream Japanese pop at the time, with melodies and arrangements that had a flavor Japanese listeners knew well. Hayashi later recalled thinking it was a very bold request. The producer gave no reason, but for a newcomer who came up singing in jazz clubs and on US bases, the direction was not surprising. What was more unusual was being asked for a melody “you could put English lyrics to as is.” It was the first time he had received such a request.

Hayashi did as asked. He composed as if it were an English song, kept time with a drum machine and sang along to his guitar into a portable cassette recorder, making a demo for the producer, who approved it on first listen. The melody was not changed for Japanese; lyricist Tokuko Miura then fitted Japanese lyrics to it, leaving one English line in the chorus: “stay with me.”

The recording brought in a group of top young session musicians of the time, including drummer Tatsuo Hayashi and bassist Tsugutoshi Goto. The structure was deliberately simple. There was no extra new melody before the last chorus, as Japanese pop songs often had, and no big climax pushing the chorus higher and higher at the end; instead a guitar solo slowly fades out. The tempo is about 108 beats per minute, a common pace for American hits of the time.

Matsubara was 19 that year. Hayashi was struck by her voice: she sang with a moist, jazzy quality, more mature than you’d expect from a newcomer.

The single sold more than 100,000 copies and became the best-selling work of her life. In 2004 she died of cervical cancer at 44. “Mayonaka no Door” gradually became an old song known only to those in the know.

Why can people who don’t understand Japanese get into it?

“Mayonaka no Door” was later classed as “city pop” (シティポップ). The term refers to Japanese pop music from the late 1970s through the 1980s, when Japanese musicians absorbed a great deal of American soul, disco and jazz, and sang about city nights, drives and romance. A curator who compiles city pop collections for a US label has described it as “music made by city people for city people.”

For foreign listeners, this music is easy to approach. The Japanese DJ Yohei Hasegawa has analyzed why “Mayonaka no Door” is popular in the West: the chorus has a line in English, and the whole song pays homage to Western music. In other words, the rhythm, groove and song structure foreigners hear are things they grew up hearing on the radio. The language is unfamiliar, but the ear is not.

The Indonesian singer Rainych is one example. She barely speaks Japanese, yet since 2016 she has posted covers of Japanese songs on YouTube, imitating the pronunciation line by line by ear. At the end of October 2020 she posted a cover of “Mayonaka no Door.” She said the song made her feel “like going back to some era long ago.”

But if the song were only “like a Western song,” foreigners could just listen to Western songs. What does it have that American pop can’t give?

Hayashi himself can’t quite say. Asked why city pop became popular abroad, he admitted, “Honestly, I have no idea.” But he offered a guess: perhaps it is a delicacy and melancholy in the melodies, something less common in Western music. He used colors as a metaphor: Japanese sensibility isn’t just “blue,” but in-between shades like blue-gray and sky blue.

This explains the song’s two layers of appeal. The Western rhythm and structure let people who don’t understand Japanese in; the slightly wistful melody written by a Japanese composer makes them stay. The 1979 request not to sound like a Japanese song ended up producing a song that sounds both familiar and fresh to foreign ears.

The song was always good, so why did it wait until 2020?

If the song suited foreign listeners all along, why didn’t it take off sooner?

In fact, people abroad had been listening for some time. The South Korean DJ and producer Night Tempo says that in his circles, songs like “Mayonaka no Door” and Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” had been circulating like internet memes five or six years earlier. In 2017 YouTube’s recommendation algorithm pushed “Plastic Love” to huge numbers of overseas users, and one fan-uploaded video had more than 22 million views by 2019.

But this enthusiasm hit a bottleneck: fans could find the songs but often couldn’t find an “official” version to listen to. “Plastic Love” was only officially released on streaming platforms in November 2020.

The reason lies in the structure of Japan’s music market. Japan is the world’s second-largest music market, but also one of the countries most attached to CDs. In 2019, CDs still made up about 70% of Japan’s recorded music sales, and streaming only about 15%. CDs bundled with perks such as priority concert tickets and handshake event passes kept selling, and record labels worried that streaming would eat into physical sales, so many works stayed off streaming for years.

In 2020 that began to change. That year, a wave of veteran artists’ catalogs arrived on streaming: Miyuki Nakajima in January, Momoe Yamaguchi in May, and Mariya Takeuchi’s greatest hits in December. Pony Canyon also put Matsubara’s songs on subscription streaming platforms in 2020, just months before Rainych’s cover.

This step was crucial. On TikTok, a song has to be in the platform’s music library before a video can use it, and listeners who hear a good song in a video and want to hear it again need to be able to find it on Spotify or Apple Music. In the past, when an old Japanese song spread abroad, the excitement often stopped in YouTube comment sections. Once a song is on streaming, every share can bring a stream, and every stream makes the algorithm push it to more people.

October 14, 2020: a steep line appears in the data

Yoshihiro Kawasaki, who handled digital marketing for Matsubara at Pony Canyon, was one of the first to see that line.

On October 1, 2020, Pony Canyon had just started a project to run streaming playlists. Tracking the data, the team noticed that from October 14, streams of “Mayonaka no Door” on Spotify suddenly shot up. By the end of October, Rainych’s cover video was online, a TikTok user in Southeast Asia had made a video with the song, and overseas YouTubers followed with their own introductions. Kawasaki says streams from the US and Indonesia were especially high.

The label then made several moves. On November 19, Pony Canyon released the official audio on TikTok so users could put it straight into their videos. On December 10 the “playing it for my mom” video appeared, and that same month the song spent 18 days in a row at No. 1 on Spotify’s Global Viral chart, also reaching No. 1 on the viral charts of many countries in the US, Europe and Asia. The viral chart looks not only at streams but at how much a song is being shared and talked about, which makes it a good way to spot songs that suddenly take off.

On December 25 an official lyric video was released. “Mayonaka no Door” never had a music video, so this was its first official video, 41 years after release. In March 2021 the 7-inch vinyl single was reissued, and in April 2022 a 12-inch vinyl followed. The streaming numbers kept climbing: more than 40 million Spotify streams by March 2021, 100 million in January 2022, and 500 million in July 2026.

Kawasaki describes the boom as something the listeners created on their own. He also points to a change streaming brought: record labels can now earn from old songs one track at a time, without having to reissue a whole album.

A forty-year-old song is now an asset that keeps growing

The effect of “Mayonaka no Door” did not stop at one song.

Rainych later worked with Sony Music Japan, releasing a 7-inch vinyl of her “Mayonaka no Door” cover in Japan in 2021, and covering Tatsuro Yamashita’s “RIDE ON TIME.” Night Tempo has released a series of official remixes of Showa-era songs, and describes Japan’s back catalog as “a mountain of treasure with many riches still sleeping.” Billboard JAPAN also launched a new chart measuring the popularity of Japanese songs in more than 200 countries and regions outside Japan, and “Mayonaka no Door” has reached No. 1 on it.

In 2025, MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN, Japan’s first major music awards of its kind, created a category for the best Japanese song that became a hit overseas. The nominees included YOASOBI’s “Idol,” Fujii Kaze’s “Shinunoga E-Wa,” and a song from 1979: “Mayonaka no Door (Stay With Me).”

Hayashi takes a calm view of the boom. He says that many people liking a song online doesn’t mean they want to own it. But he also thinks the city pop boom is not the kind of trend that explodes overnight, and that is exactly why it has lasted so long. From 2020 to 2026, the song’s streams grew from 40 million to 500 million, so he seems to have been right.

Looking back, what “Mayonaka no Door” lacked in 1979 was not quality but a road to the world. A song written to an English rhythm, carrying a Japanese melancholy, was heard back then mainly through Japan’s record shops and radio. Forty years later, streaming and short videos paved the road, and it truly left Japan for the first time.

So the song’s rebirth is less a matter of nostalgia than a belated trip abroad. For the mother in the TikTok video, “Mayonaka no Door” is a memory of youth. For the daughter filming on her phone, and for young people around the world hearing it for the first time, it is a new song. How many more songs like this Japan has, waiting to be heard for the first time, may be the most exciting part of this story.

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Notes

• Sales figures for the song at the time differ: Oricon, Japan’s sales chart, gives more than 100,000 copies, while the record label has said more than 300,000. This article uses the more conservative figure.
• Most sources say the song topped Spotify’s Global Viral chart for 18 consecutive days in 2020; some say 20. This article uses 18.
• No official announcement was found for the exact date Pony Canyon put Matsubara’s work on streaming. Based on English-language media reports, this article gives it as 2020, a few months before Rainych’s cover.
• “500 million” refers to cumulative streams on Spotify only, not including YouTube, Apple Music or other platforms.

Sources

1. Tokyo Weekender｜Miki Matsubara’s ‘Stay With Me’ Crosses 500 Million Streams on Spotify｜2026-07-21 (500 million streams, 10th Japanese-language song, first 20th-century Japanese song)｜https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertainment/music/miki-matsubaras-stay-with-me-spotify/
2. nippon.com｜シティポップの名曲「真夜中のドア」誕生秘話 (interview with Tetsuji Hayashi, by Akira Obuchi)｜2022-06-28 (the producer’s request, composing to English lyrics, the demo, session musicians, song structure and 108 BPM, Hayashi’s view of the overseas boom)｜https://www.nippon.com/ja/japan-topics/g02154/
3. Gendai Business｜Tomonori Shiba, 松原みき「真夜中のドア」世界的ヒットの背景｜2021-03 (Yoshihiro Kawasaki’s account, the October 14 data, official TikTok audio, lyric video, Night Tempo’s comments, 40 million streams)｜https://gendai.media/articles/-/81352
4. Real Sound｜シティポップ（再）入門：松原みき『POCKET PARK』｜2022-02 (Matsubara’s life, Tokuko Miura, No. 28 and 100,000 copies)｜https://realsound.jp/2022/02/post-972193.html
5. Real Sound｜林哲司『melody of memory』インタビュー｜2021-12 (Hayashi’s “no idea,” delicacy and melancholy of melody, the blue-gray metaphor, a boom that isn’t explosive)｜https://realsound.jp/2021/12/post-936149_2.html
6. Insider (via Yahoo)｜A Japanese song has unpredictably become a massive hit among TikTokers — and their parents｜2021-01-08 (the December 10, 2020 mother video and its views, Rainych and Yohei Hasegawa’s comments)｜https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/japanese-song-unpredictably-become-massive-230223595.html
7. Tokyo Weekender｜How Miki Matsubara Became a Viral Sensation 20 Years After Her Death (Matsubara’s debut, year and age of death, 2020 streaming release)｜https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertainment/music/how-miki-matsubara-became-a-viral-sensation-20-years-after-her-death/
8. Billboard JAPAN｜松原みき「真夜中のドア～stay with me」12インチアナログ再発｜2022-02-07 (18 days at No. 1, 100 million streams in early 2022, 12-inch vinyl)｜https://www.billboard-japan.com/d_news/detail/108605/2
9. Wikipedia｜Mayonaka no Door (release date, 7-inch vinyl reissue, peak of No. 1 on Billboard JAPAN’s overseas chart)｜https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayonaka_no_Door
10. Wikipedia｜Plastic Love (2017 YouTube video, 22 million views, November 2020 streaming release)｜https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_Love
11. Wikipedia｜Rainych (Rainych’s background, releases with Sony Music Japan)｜https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainych
12. The Jakarta Post (AFP)｜Change of tune: Japan music fans moving from CDs to streaming services｜2020-11-10 (CDs about 70% and streaming 15% in 2019, labels’ concerns and bundled perks)｜https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/11/10/change-of-tune-japan-music-fans-moving-from-cds-to-streaming-services.html
13. PHILE WEB｜2020年サブスク解禁アーティストまとめ｜2020-12-25 (streaming release months for Miyuki Nakajima, Momoe Yamaguchi, Mariya Takeuchi)｜https://www.phileweb.com/review/column/202012/25/1176.html
14. Rolling Stone｜City Pop: Why Does the Soundtrack to Tokyo’s Tech Boom Still Resonate?｜2019 (“music made by city people for city people”)｜https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/japanese-city-pop-returns-light-in-the-attic-compilation-pacific-breeze-822663/
15. KAI-YOU｜Billboard JAPAN、海外ヒット曲チャート「Global Japan Songs Excl. Japan」をスタート｜2023-09-14 (launch and method of the overseas chart)｜https://kai-you.net/article/87718
16. Real Sound｜MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2025 ノミネート｜2025-05 (“Mayonaka no Door” nominated for best Japanese song hit overseas)｜https://realsound.jp/2025/05/post-2014978.html