My friend told me that his friend who went to Japan a several years ago told him that ...

the Japanese consider all their popular music Jpop. They don't differentiate them as rap, heavy metal, etc.

Is that true?
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I liked Do As Infinity, but they're gone - are there bands like Do As Infinity that sing casual songs?
1/2 of Japanese songs have that really soft or girly voice & slow beat & gentle melody that I just can't stand.
And a lot of them have weird names like "Hope" "Prayer" "xxx Love"
I get them in bunches and try all of them & delete 99.9999 % of them (I very infrequently find 1 song that's pretty good, but that's what I'm going for)
but sometimes I get into trouble with my friends - they look at the file names & are like , "wth! gay!"
I live in the US so I just don't can't figure out what's the trend now.

All popular music can be considered pop. That's what 'pop' means - Popular. So if you say that all popular music is pop then, by definition, I'd have to say yes you're right.
But I think to say that what we would consider to be pop - as opposed to rock, rap, etc etc - is the only thing in Japan, then you're woefully wrong.

So you mean they classify the other music genres as mainly Jpop? The answer would be 'no' if jpop pertains to japanese pop. It's like Darkvein-san said.

JAM Project. NOW.

Have you forgotten J-Rock?

Visual Kei is a genre

J-Rock is ok. J-Pop is awesome. J-Metal sucks. J-Rap should die horribly.