Let’s make the best anime playlist on Spotify
The world is not at its best with COVID-19 spreading, but I hope you and your loved ones are all doing well.
During these hard times, I recommend you to listen to the song “Light The Light” by RADWIMPS (Your Name & Weathering with You OSTs), it was initially released for people in China but I think it concerns all of us now, and can help everyone to keep hope.
I’m currently confined at home, catching up on my anime & manga backlog, playing Animal Crossing and of course, working on AniPlaylist :)
Since I have (plenty of) time, I thought this was a good opportunity to write a post about the current state of our playlists, what has changed recently, and what will change soon.
What happened since then?
First and foremost, I was interviewed by Katy Castillo about AniPlaylist! If you want to know more or if you don’t know what AniPlaylist is, you can read the interview on Yatta-Tachi.
A lot of things happened during the last six months :
- October 2019 : we have launched aniplaylist.com. It’s a website where you can easily search anime songs on Spotify (by anime, song title, artist, song type, label & country availability).
You no longer need to find the Japanese writing or have to go through a thousand cover before finding the song you want.
- End of October : Lantis started adding their artists on Spotify (JAM Project, Stereo Dive Foundation, TRUE, ZAQ…) and they are still bringing more.
- November : it was FlyingDog’s turn to arrive on Spotify, bringing us anime songs from Card Captor Sakura, Aquarion, Panty & Stocking, Last Exile and even soundtracks from .hack by Yuki Kajiura.
- January 2020 : Gundam songs arrived on Spotify through SUNRISE Music Label
- February : our playlists are now available on Deezer.
- March 1st : Studio Ghibli movies Original Soundtracks were released worldwide on Spotify
- March 4th : Warner Bros brought back their anime song catalog on Spotify, along with much-awaited Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure original soundtracks!
I can’t wait to see what’s next!
Since the website’s release, the playlists have been a bit in the background. It’s kind of obvious since the website took a lot of time and filling the database (which the playlists depends on) was the priority.
Speaking of database, I would like to thank Ryunako and 10kArLcRockets for helping me with that huge task. Thanks to both of them we have now more than 7 000 entries on the website, that’s 3 000 more than in October.
Yes, 3 000 songs/albums added manually into the database, with titles in romaji & kanji, song types, related anime and finding CD thumbnails when available.
Feel free to join our Discord server to thank them, they deserve it!
The side effect of having more songs in the database is that we will soon be reaching two limits…
Algolia‘s 10 000 records limit
Algolia is the service powering the search engine on aniplaylist.com. I’ve been using it for years personally and have always been pleasantly surprised by its speed, reliability and search possibilities.
Today, we are on a free plan which gives us 10 000 records (1 record = 1 song or album), once we will reach that limit we will have to go for a paid plan, 29$ a month to get 50 000 records, which I hope will be enough for a few years.
I will probably talk about it again later, but remember that you can support AniPlaylist by paying us a coffee!
Spotify’s 10 000 songs limit
You may not know that, but you can’t have more than 10 000 songs in a playlist (or in your “Liked Songs”). Most people never need that much songs in a single playlist, but in our case, the main playlist has always been a list of all the songs we had found.
It has : 6 300 songs. 440 hours of music. 18 days of non-stop anime music!
Seeing the speed at which we are adding anime songs to the database, we will probably reach the 10 000 limit in less than 6 months.
Now you know what limitation we will be facing soon, and this leads me to something we have worked on for the past few weeks.
Some changes in our playlists
Lately our playlists have changed, if you go on our Spotify profile you may notice that most of our playlists have now a custom thumbnail with the anime title’s on it.
I always wanted to have some kind of visual identity for our playlists, and now we have thanks to Ryunako’s hard work!
But that’s not all, the playlists content has also changed : I’ve worked on a (invisible) website feature that will generate playlist content.
Until now, all playlists were just lists of songs with albums appended at the end, I had to manually create and reorder them, for example when I wanted a new Opening or Ending to be at the top of the playlist.
Now, thanks to this new feature, playlists will be regularly and automatically updated and will be sorted in a more logical way. Sorting will be done with the website’s score which ranks the songs based on the following data:
- anime score
- popularity of the song
- count of countries in which it is playable
- date it was added or updated on the website
Anime playlists are dedicated to one or more anime and will contain all type of songs (OP, ED, IN…), sometimes albums (OST, Character songs…) if some are available.
These playlists will be updated once a month and every time a song from one of the related anime is added or updated in database.
Year & past season playlists contain songs (no albums) related to anime that aired on a given period. These will be updated once a month, with the exception of the current season playlist that will be updated twice a week on release days.
What about the main playlist?
The main playlist has always had this role of listing all anime songs available on Spotify, but it’s now irrelevant since aniplaylist.com has been released.
The playlist will soon or later reach the 10 000 limit, also I’m well aware of the multiple inconveniences it bears (too long and not easily downloadable for offline mode, lack of relevancy, duplicate songs, songs not available in people’s country).
All these points led me to start thinking about how could I change the main playlist into something else, and the idea of the best anime playlist on Spotify quickly came to mind.
What will change?
First I wanted to define the playlist’s length. I thought about following Spotify’s way of making playlists with around 50 tracks, but I don’t think that would be enough to represent anime music. So I will probably go with 250, or maybe 500 songs, not more because the playlist should be easily downloadable for offline listening.
Then comes the content. I know that“best anime playlist” is subjective, but my idea for this playlist is that it should be a safe bet. No matter when you come back to it, you will know it will always have awesome anime songs in it.
Of course, the songs selected in the playlist will have to be available in as much countries as possible to avoid any frustrations ;)
About the song order, we could use the website’s score as we do for anime & year playlists, but that would mean all recent entries will automatically be included and placed first in the playlist. Which might not be what we want since anyone should be able to get on the playlist and find songs they already know. Thus the order will be defined by songs’ popularity.
To sum up, here’s what the main playlist may become soon :
- A playlist with 250 to 500 songs in it
- Containing awesome anime songs
- Most songs will be available worldwide
- Updated weekly
But before applying these changes, I would love to know what you think about this idea since you are the ones using the playlist, so feel free to comment below or come talk about it with us on Discord!
For those concerned about not having a way to find new songs, here’s a new playlist called “New on AniPlaylist.com” which gathers the 100 most recent songs added to the database, it will be updated daily.
See you next time!
This post was written while listening to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure OST vol.1 by Yugo Kanno & Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex be Human by Yoko Kanno.
Now is a good time to watch Stand Alone Complex, the sequel will be released on Netflix on April 24th :)
