While Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Iwasawa and Yui can all be considered successful musicians, there is a certain something that sets these girls apart from all the rest of the J-rock and J-pop groups out there. What is it you ask? The fact that their songs are sung by the character’s seiyuus, or voice actors/actresses.

Featured prominently on two popular anime titles, K-On! and Angel Beats!, the series featuring these fiction girl bands  have been met with commercial success in Japan, with their singles often reaching the top of the Oricon Weekly Singles Chart, the Japanese equivalent to the United State’s Billboard Top 100.

K-On!’s story focuses on a group of Japanese high school girls who come together to save their school’s light music club from disbanding.   Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Tsumugi Kotobuki, and Azusa Nakano eventually form the group Hokago Teatime (After school Teatime).  Hokago Teatime’s Cagayake! Girls served as the opening theme for the first season of the anime and it also happened to reach spot number four on the Oricon weekly singles charts.  Don’t Say Lazy, another song by Hokago Teatime, debuted at second place and has sold over 67,000 copies.  The group’s mini-album entitled Ho-Kago Tea Time snagged first place during its debut and marked the first time an album credited to fictional anime characters reached the highest position.   Hokago Tea Time would go on to release Go! Go! Maniac and Listen!!, the opening theme and ending theme for the second season of K-On! anime. Both of these songs achieved the over 76,000 sales each, making the K-On! girls the first female vocalists since Seiko Matsuda, who did it in 1983, to occupy the top two spots simultaneously on the singles chart. Their most recent singles, No Thank You! and Utayou!  Miracle, are already big hits after being released on August 4, 2010.

While the success of Hokago Tea Time is remarkable in itself, a relatively new anime entitled Angel Beats! is looking to duplicate, if not exceed, them. Written by master storyteller Jun Maeda, who was also the lead writer behind KEY’s Kanon and Air, Angel Beats! follows a rag tag organization called the Shinda Sekai Sensen (Afterlife Warfront) as they battle against God for revenge of their cruel fates while they were living. Set in a high school, that acts as a purgatory, the Shinda Sekai Sensen (SSS) use different tactics in their attempt to disrupt the status quo by attacking the student body “president” or stealing student meal tickets. The SSS makes use of a band consisting of four members named Girls Dead Monster (Girls DeMo) in order to provide distractions for their operations. Although the singing voices of Girls Dead Monster are not by their character’s seiyuus, the success of Girls DeMo is reminiscent of Hokago Tea Time. LisA and Marina, the singers behind Girls DeMo’s Yui and Iwasawa, have rocketed Crow Song and Thousand Enemies to the number for and seven spots, respectively, on Oricon. Little Braver, their third single, claimed second place on the Oricon weekly singles chart at its debut. Girls DeMo’s album, entitled Keep the Beats!, ranked sixth overall on the Oricon Albums Chart after selling about 51,000 copies in its first week of sales.

Bringing an entirely new perspective to the word “band,” the success of Hokago Tea Time and Girls DeMo have certainly taken many by surprise and the anime industry is definitely making its presence head in the music scene amongst all the “real” groups out there. Will there be another fictional band joining the ranks of Hokago Tea Time and Girls DeMo in 2011? Only time will tell.

Tags: Angel Beats!, k-on!