J-pop is dead: Critic assures that Japanese music depends on anime

Here’s what nobody wants to admit: most of us outside Japan would struggle to name a single J-pop artist who hasn’t soundtracked a sword fight or a dramatic train departure in some animated series. LiSA? Demon Slayer. Kenshi Yonezu? Chainsaw Man. King Gnu? Jujutsu Kaisen. The discovery pathway is convenient, certainly—but convenient for whom?

Japanese music critic Mino recently published an essay that lays bare an uncomfortable truth the industry has been sidestepping for years. Independent J-pop, he argues, isn’t just struggling. It’s fading. It’s being systematically erased.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Mino examined the Billboard Japan Hot 100 for 2025 and found something stark: of the year’s ten most successful tracks, only two existed without attachment to a franchise, television drama, or commercial campaign.

• Rosé and Bruno Mars collaboration—conquered global charts anyway
• Rose by Japanese artist HANA

Everything else? Commissioned work. Product.

Consider King Gnu, a band genuinely respected for their musicianship. Their album THE GREATEST UNKNOWN contains fourteen tracks. Thirteen of them—93%—were created as themes for anime, dramas, or advertisements. This isn’t an outlier. Mrs. GREEN APPLE, Kenshi Yonezu, Sakanaction: all operating under the same model the Japanese industry calls tie-in.

The 89-Second Problem

Traditional anime openings run precisely one minute and twenty-nine seconds. That’s the slot. So artists now engineer songs to cram their entire emotional payload—hook, chorus, crescendo—into that brief window. It’s musical clickbait.

Here’s the insidious bit: even tracks not destined for anime are being composed this way, because the formula has become the industry’s default setting.

No song can reach the top of the charts without being associated with other forms of media. — Mino

Record labels have repositioned bands as content farms for fictional properties. The tail wags the dog. The tail wags the dog, and the dog has learned to enjoy it.

• If a song’s primary purpose is to serve a narrative that isn’t its own, can we still call it art—or has it become decoration?
• What happens to an entire generation of Japanese musicians who might have something to say, but nothing to soundtrack?
• Is the West merely late to this realisation, or have we simply accepted that our discovery of foreign music will always be filtered through whatever’s trending on streaming platforms?