A great step forward for anime songs on Spotify
You’ve probably heard that “Spotify is filled with anime song covers” or “There’s no anime songs on Spotify”. The first one is true, the second is wrong. Let me prove it to you.
What is AniPlaylist?
This project’s purpose is to find and list every official anime songs (openings, endings, insert songs and OST) available legally on Spotify.
As of now we’ve already found a great amount of songs :
- ~ 1 900 songs (openings, endings, insert songs)
- ~ 230 albums (original soundtracks, character songs)
- We have also created more than 40 playlists by anime, season and year to help people find their favorite songs
AniPlaylist is mostly active on Twitter and Reddit where we share as much new released and older songs as we can.
Song requests and region locks
We spend a great part of our time searching for songs people requested us, and here are the three answers we usually give:
- “The song is available on Spotify, here’s the link!”
- “Sorry, the song is not on Spotify…”
- “Sorry, the song is on Spotify, but it’s only available for Japan.”
Between the two negative answers, the last is the most common and frustrating one.
So when we find a region locked music, we store it in a specific playlist to keep track of all of these unavailable songs. That playlist has already more than a 1 000 songs.
Sometimes some of these songs can be “unlocked” for various reasons. When it happens it’s really helpful to have this playlist, we simply check if it’s playable or not. If it is, then a song in it is now available worldwide. Champagne!
But it’s something rare, it happens only once every two weeks for 2 or 3 songs, not more.
By the way, every time we can’t send the link to a song whether because it’s not on Spotify or region locked, we are taking notes of the artist/song and the person who asked for it.
That way we have a list of commonly asked songs and artists, and when a song become available we can send a message to the person who requested it!
Can we do something about it?
The answer is “yes, probably”.
During the last few weeks we started sending messages to artists and record labels in order to ask them if they could release their songs for foreign countries.
Out of 40-50 messages, we’ve got 6 “seen” on our messages and 3 actual answers.
We were so happy when the first one arrived!
Here are some details about the answers we received.
1) Sony Music Japan
One of these answers was from Sony Music Japan, which owns most of anime music in Japan.
But… they told us to ask Spotify directly.
A few days later we’ve talked with Spotify’s support to ask if they had someone who could help us with that : the answer is no, countries availability are managed by record companies… Feeling stucked in an infinite loop.
We’ll try to ask Sony Music Japan again later.
2) YURiKA & Taku Iwasaki
YURiKA is an artist who made her debut in 2017 with the opening of Little Witch Academia (TV) from studio Trigger.
We decided to contact her staff account on Twitter because her most recent songs were available worldwide on Spotify (Hanebado! Opening, Anima Yell! insert songs) but not her previous ones (Little Witch Academia Opening 1 & 2, Houseki no Kuni/Land of the Lustrous Opening).
We’ve got an answer from the staff just the day after! They told us to wait while they were investigating it.
We’ve also contacted Taku Iwasaki, a renowned music composer who worked on animes such as Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Akame ga Kill!, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Bungou Stray Dogs. We didn’t get an answer from him yet.
No news but a HUGE surprise
We are now 10 days after YURiKA_Staff’s message and we have no news from them, however we had a surprise this morning (February 9th when writing this).
When doing our daily check of our region locked playlist we’ve noticed something unexpected and unprecedented.
More than 200 songs were now available worldwide, from different animes and artists : Yowamushi Pedal songs, Little Witch Academia OST, songs by Yuiko Oohara (Land of the Lustrous ED, Little Witch Academia EDs) and more importantly : Akame ga Kill! OST by Taku Iwasaki and songs by YURiKA.
At first we didn’t see the common trait of all these songs, but after searching a bit we found out : all of these songs and albums are from TOHO Records.
Can we assume that YURiKA_Staff or Taku Iwasaki asked if it was possible and TOHO decided to release a large amount of their songs worldwide? We hope so.
Parting words and links to the songs
We can’t be 100% sure all of this is thanks to the little message we sent to YURiKA_Staff or Taku Iwasaki, but honestly what are the chances that TOHO would randomly release their songs worldwide for no apparent reason?
This is giving us so much hope and we will definitely continue on that way and try to contact more artists and record labels. Now that you know, don’t hesitate to tell us which songs and artists you’d love to listen on Spotify!
Thank you for reading and I hope you’ll enjoy these newly available songs as much as we do.
Be sure to follow us on Spotify and Twitter to stay updated on every new songs additions.
We’ve gathered these newly available songs from TOHO Records under playlists (adding previously available songs), here are the links :
- Houseki no Kuni (Land of the Lustrous) : Opening & Ending
- Akame ga Kill! : Original Soundtrack
- Little Witch Academia : Openings, Endings & Original Soundtrack
- Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san : Opening & Endings
- Isshuukan Friends (One Week Friends) : Opening, Endings & Original Soundtrack
- Yowamushi Pedal : Openings, Endings, Original Soundtracks & Character songs
- Himouto! Umaru-chan : Openings, Endings & Original Soundtrack
- Hanebado! : Insert song (OP/ED/OST were already available)
- Chaos Dragon : Opening, Endings & Original Soundtrack
- Touken Ranbu Hanamaru : Opening & 1st Ending
- Sansha San’you : Opening, Ending & Insert song
- Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou : Opening & Ending
EDIT : You can now search your favorite anime songs on Spotify via our website : aniplaylist.com
