Music is an important part of every culture. Even though its purpose may have changed and evolved and various styles have risen and fallen in popularity, music is one of those things that will probably endure for generations to come. Music can be used to help relax, concentrate, soothe, excite, entertain — basically invoke any and every emotion. Even language isn’t a barrier to enjoyment.
But what can be a barrier is lack of access to content. Theme songs have long been a way to introduce artists to movie and TV show watchers, and it often came with a way to associate positivity between the music and the show. But while anime and even Japanese dramas have become more and more accessible over the years, the same couldn’t always be said of their soundtracks, let alone artists’ other works. Services like ANiUTa tried to solve this problem with a catalog of Japanese songs available to stream, and they even teamed up with anime streaming Crunchyroll to reach out to anisong fans.
But ANiUTa shut down in July 2022. However, Crunchyroll is once again trying to team up to deliver musical content to fans, this time courtesy of its parent company.
At its Anime Music Awards, Crunchyroll announced it was partnering with Sony Music Entertainment Japan to add music videos and concerts to the service. Among the initial artists named were LiSA (Demon Slayer, Sword Art Online) and Hiroyuki Sawano (Attack on Titan, The Seven Deadly Sins).
The Crunchyroll menu now has a Music Videos & Concerts section. The main page features a revolving carousel advertising artists like TrySail and YOASOBI to take you to their page of content.
Scrolling down, other lists include Iconic Music Videos, Full-Length Concerts, Artists We Love, and then a couple of Artist Spotlights. The latter has two right now (FLOW and YUI), and I have no idea how often these are updated to another singer or band.
Unfortunately, this page makes it seem like this is all the artists available when this is not the case. Angela Aki, for instance, has 14 videos, but you wouldn’t know that from the Music Videos & Concerts page.
In fact, according to Crunchyroll, “Fans will be able to enjoy over 100 full-length concerts and thousands of music videos featuring hundreds of contemporary artists!”, so a lot is not initially noticeable.
Crunchyroll already has a “Music” tag, which leads to anime like Love Live! and Sound Euphonium. Artists’ pages have tags like “J-Pop” and “Rock”, but they can’t be used to navigate to other music. Searching “J-Pop” and such does help bring up these hidden videos, but this is not a long-term solution. Crunchyroll needs to have all videos and concerts sorted and somehow accessible from the Music Videos & Concerts section. Additional comments from social media indicate musical content is unavailable or extremely limited on apps.
Anyway, all content is exclusive to Premium members. This is understandable for concerts and such, but this doesn’t make sense for many music videos. For instance, YUI’s “Again”, the first opening to Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is already available to stream for free on YouTube.
It’s not the music video version, but if you just want to hear the track, there’s no need for Crunchyroll’s version. Meanwhile, “Crossing Field” by LiSA has the music video available on there.
In addition, while it’d be nigh impossible to check every video, there doesn’t seem to be subtitles for either speaking or singing portions of events.
This unfortunately means that this doesn’t help wean a lot of Japanese music lovers from watching fansubbed content or makes it more enticing to subscribe to Crunchyroll over just listening to tunes on Spotify and Amazon Music. There, they also have some content from other labels. Crunchyroll has music now because Sony owns them, and I imagine it would may be difficult and/or cost-prohibitive to get other companies’ artists and tracks on Crunchyroll. It would be great for anime idol groups to tie into Crunchyroll anime though.
Perhaps though more Sony artist CDs (and maybe vinyls) will also appear on Right Stuf or Crunchyroll Store now. They offer some already, but this way, someone could get into a singer or band due to an anime series, check out their other music and even concerts on Crunchyroll, and then buy a full album at one of their stores.
Still, I wish some of their music videos were made available to free members, especially since there are no subtitles are many (all?) of the song vids. The concerts though are a bigger boon, as I know a lot of concert Blu-rays are region-locked in Japan, making it very hard for international fans willing to pay around $70, 80, 100+ American to enjoy them.
Still, making more Japanese musical content available internationally is a positive, and with Crunchyroll’s popularity, a lot of anime fans will be able to enjoy these videos and concerts at no additional cost. But Crunchyroll needs to do better to make the stuff easier to find and enjoy, especially since there are ways to enjoy many of these artists for free elsewhere.