Anime Fan Culture and Anime Music Videos

The rise of anime fandom in the United States was a movement fueled by the arrival of large file sharing and peer-to-peer networks over the Internet. It allowed fans of anime in the US to connect with Japanese fans, receive the raw episodes of popular anime, and use the power of collective intelligence online to subtitle the raw anime and re-release it over the peer-to-peer networks for other fans to download and watch. When the anime creators found out about this, instead of suing the fans and stopping the distribution of anime online, they realized the potential that this new market had opened up and began working to license the shows that were popular with fans for DVD distribution in the US. As a sign of their dedication to anime, and not just to the ability to download shows for free, the fans made it an unwritten rule that the fan-subbed versions would stop circulating as soon as the licensed versions were distributed, and this is a rule of anime fan culture that persists to this day.

However, as anime fandom has grown larger and as more companies are realizing the potential of this market, the fans have been losing control over which titles get licensed and distributed and which do not. The anime market, which used to be full of new and original shows that the fans enjoyed, has become a mass market where each licensed title is decided upon by the distributors and the companies who own them. A niche market that used to rely on the desires of its fans has been swallowed up by the corporate ideology that says that businesses should decide what their consumers want, and not the other way around. As a result, anime fans are finding it harder to support the industry that they once helped create, and are beginning to return to the P2P networks for the latest and rarest fan-subbed anime.

One element of anime fan culture that bridges the gap between the online fan communities and the corporate DVD market is that of anime music videos. As the technology for video editing gets better, fans who create their own music videos always want the highest quality video sources possible, which can only come from DVDs. So fans who want to make unique and high-quality music videos will buy the DVDs to rip and use that footage to create unique expressions of their love of anime to be shared with the online community. From political statements, to personal character portraits, to re-imaginings of characters and stories, to comedy and action and tragedy and drama, anime music video creators represent a wide spectrum of talent that works as a wonderful expression of both the humble beginnings of anime fandom in the US, and the corporate culture that empowers them to make wonderful works of digital art.