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Nana app gets anime theme songs, available globally without location restriction

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese music collaboration app Nana has partnered with Joysound, one of the country’s biggest karaoke service providers, to provide anime theme songs for karaoke in its app. What’s most interesting here is that despite the fact that most music-related services have geographically limited availability due to copyright, Nana’s anime theme songs will be available to users the world over. The startup has an agreement with Joysound for the master license for these anime theme songs, with a blanket purchase agreement in place JASRAC, Japan’s copyright control authority. For readers not yet familiar with Nana, the app allows users to share and mix their audio with other users on the platform, all with voices and sounds recorded through smartphone microphones. The startup aims to bring new users the experience of singing along with someone else. Singers can even team up with a band or a choir in this way, even if your collaborators live on the other side of the world. Nana launched its beta version last August, and its global version followed last November. According to the startup’s co-founder and CEO Akinori Fumihara, the app currently has about 25,000 users, and 70% of them…

See the original story in Japanese.

nana-musicJapanese music collaboration app Nana has partnered with Joysound, one of the country’s biggest karaoke service providers, to provide anime theme songs for karaoke in its app.

What’s most interesting here is that despite the fact that most music-related services have geographically limited availability due to copyright, Nana’s anime theme songs will be available to users the world over. The startup has an agreement with Joysound for the master license for these anime theme songs, with a blanket purchase agreement in place JASRAC, Japan’s copyright control authority.

For readers not yet familiar with Nana, the app allows users to share and mix their audio with other users on the platform, all with voices and sounds recorded through smartphone microphones. The startup aims to bring new users the experience of singing along with someone else. Singers can even team up with a band or a choir in this way, even if your collaborators live on the other side of the world. Nana launched its beta version last August, and its global version followed last November.

According to the startup’s co-founder and CEO Akinori Fumihara, the app currently has about 25,000 users, and 70% of them are teenage girls. More than 120,000 songs have been exchanged using the platform, and about 1,200 songs are being posted every day.

Japan’s karaoke giant Joysound provides anime theme songs to karaoke bars and nightclubs all across the country. They are also known for providing many user-created or Vocaloid songs, typically posted by amateur singers on Japan’s video sharing site Nico Nico Douga.

Nico Nico Douga has many videos tagged as ‘I’ve sung this song,’ a good indication that there’s actually a culture growing around users who record themselves singing popular songs on the platform. As the Nana app makes it easier for you to record yourself and post to the internet, this new Joysound partnership may encourage Nana users to sing and share even more. Fumihara notes:

The anime theme song genre is a suitable one that people will enjoy singing together. I hope the partnership will generate even more song-based communication among people.

If you’d like to try the Nana app for yourself, you can get it for iOS over on the App Store.