Anisongs
But an enormous amount of craft is packed into those 90 seconds. Presenting an entire fictional world in a minute and a half. Folding an intro, a verse and a chorus into that span. Slipping the source material's themes into the lyrics without ever becoming explanatory. And on top of all that, staying interesting after a dozen weekly repeats.
There are not many jobs in music with that many constraints. And the tighter the constraints, the more nakedly a writer's ability shows.
When anison was looked down on, just a little
There was a time when anime music was quietly regarded as a lesser thing.
If you were talking about music and named an anime theme as a favorite song, the air in the room shifted slightly. If you remember that feeling, you are probably my generation. The genre was treated as a rung below. Nobody could explain why. The atmosphere was simply there.
In that era, I believed the exact opposite. I thought the talent of Japan's musicians was concentrated in anison.
You offer your music into someone else's world. The length is fixed. The function it must serve is spelled out. And unless you still manage to leave your own mark on it, the result is just background music. A song that survives those conditions has to be denser than one written somewhere with no conditions at all. That is what I kept thinking. Anison is incredible — why doesn't anyone respect it?
Now it is a battlefield for talent
That atmosphere is gone.
Anime theme songs have become a field where Japan's leading artists compete. Bands, singer-songwriters, writers who came up through Vocaloid, techno producers — everyone plays on the same field under the same constraints. Landing an anime theme is now talked about as a badge rather than a blemish. What used to sit a rung below has quietly moved to the center of the music scene.
Watching that battlefield is enormously fun.
Half of the fun is still the constraint. Ninety seconds. Consistency with the world of the work. The eyes of the original fans. When a song satisfies all of that and still could only have been written by that one person, it is genuinely powerful. Constraints do not kill talent. Constraints make talent visible.
Unexpected people, unexpected shows
The other half of the fun is in the credits.
Take the 1995 anthology film MEMORIES. The opening PROLOGUE and the ending IN YER MEMORY were both handled by Takkyu Ishino — the Takkyu Ishino of Denki Groove. He composed and arranged them himself. A core figure of Japanese techno walked straight into a mid-90s animated feature.
The opening of ClassicaLoid in 2016, ClassicaLoid ~Theme of ClassicaLoid~, was written, composed, arranged and performed by Tomoyasu Hotei. The guitarist of BOØWY became the face of an absurd show about classical composers reborn in the present day.
KICK BACK from Chainsaw Man is widely known as a Kenshi Yonezu song, but the arrangement credit lists Daiki Tsuneta alongside him — Daiki Tsuneta of King Gnu. One line of credits tells you a little about where that song's strange forward momentum comes from.
I love this kind of metadata. Who wrote it. Who arranged it. What else has this person worked on. The moment you learn that, a song that was merely a theme tune stands up as a piece of someone's career. The way it sounds actually changes.
And I have always wanted more people to have that experience.
But building a playlist is a chore
The problem is that the entrance is exhausting.
To assemble an anison playlist that matches your taste, you first have to remember the songs. Then search for each one. Add them one at a time. Look for something similar. Search again. It takes a huge amount of time. I have started and abandoned that process many times myself.
So I handed that part to AI.
The Anisongs app has no AI of its own. Instead it hands the Anisongs database to the AI you already use — Claude or ChatGPT — as a tool. Your AI already knows your taste. Connect it to anison data reaching from the 1950s to the present, and a playlist comes back in a single exchange.
A theme is enough of a prompt. "Anison for running at night." "Only robot anime themes from the 90s." "A setlist built around a particular lyricist." Even a vague brief gets read for intent and turned into a running order. It is an order of magnitude faster than doing it yourself.
Then take it to the music app you already use
A playlist you never listen to is worthless.
Tap the link your AI returns, open it in the app, and the whole thing exports to YouTube Music and Apple Music in one tap. Those two are the ones that take a playlist whole, today.
For Spotify, Amazon Music and LINE MUSIC you add tracks through per-song search links. To be honest about it: that part is still manual. Whether a bulk import is possible depends heavily on how far each music service opens up outside write access. I will implement one-tap export for those services as they open up.
The same goes for the other direction. Reading a playlist you already own and pulling only the anison out of it is a feature I want to build, but the same platform limits apply, and it does not exist yet. When it works, I will say so.
Either way, the destination is whatever music app you already live in. I have no intention of making you listen inside Anisongs.
It is fine if you don't know the songs
The list your AI builds will probably contain songs you have never heard. That is fine. That is the point.
When an unfamiliar track comes on, keep the playlist open in the app. Under the song title you will see which show it belongs to, whether it was an opening or an ending, and what year it is from. Swipe a track left and you get a note on the performing artist and a note on the show. Want more, and you can jump straight to the Anisongs page.
"So that's what this song was the opening for" happens on the spot. The discovery I described earlier happens while you listen.
And when you want to tell someone what you have on right now, hit 🎧 Now!. It shares the track with the song and show attached. The heat of the moment you find a great song can only be shared that same day.
Everything about the app is here: https://anisongs.jp/app
So please don't skip it
I did not build this app for revenue, or because the engineering was interesting.
I built it because I still believe the talent of Japan's musicians is concentrated in anison. And because that talent, folded into 90 seconds, sits in the single most skippable place there is. "What a waste" does not cover it.
When you watch anime on a streaming service, you probably skip the opening and the ending. But someone's fight with a very hard set of constraints is in there, every time. Unexpected people are writing unexpected songs for unexpected shows.
So please listen. Every time. Don't skip it.
I wanted to make something that gives you a reason to. That is the most honest explanation of why this app exists.
