On paper, there is very little about “Idol” that sounds engineered for the internet.
YOASOBI‘s 2023 hit, written as the opening theme for the anime Oshi no Ko, is musically restless. Over the course of less than four minutes, it ricochets between glitchy pop, rap, choral flourishes, and something much darker, while vocalist ikura switches between voices with almost theatrical agility. It doesn’t exactly sound like a song constructed around the neat, repeatable 15-second snippet that has come to define the TikTok era.
And yet the internet couldn’t get enough of it.
“Idol” quickly escaped the orbit of Oshi no Ko. With over 689 million views on YouTube and 588 million streams on Spotify, it became a dance, a cover, an edit, a challenge — the kind of song you could encounter online without ever knowing the anime that inspired it. For YOASOBI, a duo whose music has always been inseparable from the internet, it was perhaps the ultimate example of what can happen to a song once they let it go.
But don’t mistake that virality for a formula. Ayase, YOASOBI’s producer and songwriter, has little interest in writing for the algorithm.
“I don’t want to get in a situation where I’m thinking about that with intention,” Ayase told Mashable through an interpreter, referring to the pressure to build songs around moments that can be easily clipped or shared online.
In Japan, he said, it’s become increasingly important for a song’s success that it can circulate on TikTok, inspire a dance, or become a meme. He understands the commercial logic. He just doesn’t personally subscribe to it. For Ayase, making music requires balancing art with commercial viability. His preferred ratio is roughly 60 percent art to 40 percent commerce. Writing specifically in pursuit of a meme or viral moment, he said, feels more like 30/70. “That’s not something that I want to do for the songs that we make,” he explained.
It’s a fascinating position for someone at the center of one of the most internet-native acts in contemporary Japanese pop. YOASOBI’s very existence is intertwined with the web. Before the duo formed, Ayase built an audience uploading Vocaloid songs online, while singer-songwriter ikura posted covers. YOASOBI’s foundational concept of turning novels into songs similarly grew out of an online ecosystem, with source material coming from stories submitted to and published through online platforms.
That concept has since expanded far beyond its origins. Their latest collaboration, “Orion,” takes its source material from Overwatch, the massively popular online game. Ayase wrote the song from “The Fall of a Sparrow,” a short story about Overwatch characters Kiriko, Genji, and Hanzo; the collaboration then sent it back into the game’s digital universe through an animated music video and in-game content. An English version followed, and this month, Japanese producer PSYQUI gave the song yet another life with a new remix.
“Orion” traces a particularly neat digital loop: YOASOBI turned an Overwatch story into a song, expanded it with an animated music video, and watched it return to the game as music players could actually interact with it.
That kind of movement between stories, songs, platforms, and audiences feels almost intrinsic to YOASOBI now. But when the duo debuted in 2019, their relationship to the internet was distinctive enough that they were frequently described in Japan as an internet-born act.
“At the time, I thought that was true,” Ayase said. Now, he sees YOASOBI as less of an internet anomaly and more of a product of a broader cultural shift. Using the internet to express yourself through music, release songs, or even find collaborators has become so commonplace, he explained, that “it’s almost more unusual not to use it.”
The internet-native qualities that once made YOASOBI stand out are now simply part of how music gets made. In that sense, the duo didn’t simply adapt to the internet. They emerged alongside a music industry being fundamentally reorganized by it.
Ironically, neither Ayase nor ikura describes a particularly online childhood.
ikura started making music around 15, but much of her time was spent in decidedly offline pursuits, like playing trumpet in her school orchestra, studying classical ballet, and performing in musicals. Ayase similarly began pursuing music around 15 or 16. Before that, growing up in the countryside, he remembers playing baseball, soccer, and basketball outside with friends.
Their lives look considerably more online now. Ayase described his daily existence as essentially two activities: making music on his computer and endlessly watching YouTube. Outside of eating, sleeping, and the other requirements of being a human being, he joked, a MacBook is more or less all he needs.
ikura is a YouTube obsessive, too, particularly when it comes to watching people play video games. She’ll put on gaming streams during her downtime and while traveling.
But YOASOBI’s relationship with the internet isn’t simply about how much time its members spend online. It’s about what happens there after they press upload. They learned that with their very first single.
Credit: Courtesy of YOASOBI
When “Yoru ni Kakeru,” or “Into the Night,” arrived in 2019, there was no precedent for what would happen next. Ayase hoped the song would reach people, of course, but there was no way of knowing how far it could travel. Then it kept traveling. As the song spread online and climbed the charts in Japan, Ayase remembers experiencing a mix of excitement, relief, disbelief, and emotions he didn’t quite know how to process. It was the first time Ayase and ikura had watched one of their songs become that big.
More hits followed. And eventually, Ayase stopped watching. These days, he tries not to pay much attention to the numerical life of a YOASOBI song — where it ranks each week, how many times it’s being played, or whether its performance meets some quantifiable expectation. It’s better for his mental health that way, he said. The internet may have given YOASOBI a career, but Ayase has had to learn not to constantly watch what it’s doing with it.
That became particularly complicated with “Idol.” Unlike “Into the Night,” Ayase wasn’t waiting to find out whether “Idol” could become a hit. He believed it had to. He described approaching the song determined to “hit a home run.” In his mind, he said, he hit a grand slam.
That confidence was accompanied by enormous anxiety. For roughly a year before “Idol,” YOASOBI had continued releasing successful music, but Ayase felt the songs weren’t reaching the level he expected of himself. Because YOASOBI frequently works in conjunction with other projects and cultural moments, he worried about how quickly public attention could disappear if they stopped producing songs that felt like events.
“If we don’t succeed with this one, we might not actually have a chance,” he remembered thinking.
He was so confident in “Idol” — and so afraid of being wrong — that before its release, he dreamed about the song coming out and failing. So when “Idol” became the hit he’d hoped for, the happiness came with an enormous sense of relief.
There is an important distinction, though, between Ayase wanting “Idol” to reach as many people as possible and building it according to a viral blueprint. He admits he had imagined Japanese idols potentially dancing to a song literally called “Idol.” And like any songwriter releasing music into today’s pop landscape, he can imagine certain parts of a song catching on. What he resists is letting that possibility dictate the music itself.
Once a song leaves his computer, however, his feelings about control change considerably. That’s where ikura comes in.
YOASOBI regularly encounters what fans do with their music after release, from covers and instrumental performances to dances and other reinterpretations. In Japan, there’s a long tradition of this kind of participatory music culture online, where users don’t just listen to a song but sing it, play it, dance to it, remix it, and upload their own version for the next person to discover. ikura watches those fan creations, and the group shares favorites among its team.
For her, those reinterpretations aren’t simply promotional fuel helping a song reach another potential listener. They’re part of what the song becomes. YOASOBI’s creative process already begins with an act of reinterpretation. Someone writes a story. Ayase and ikura take that story and transform it into music. Then listeners hear their version and filter it through their own experiences, sometimes creating something new and putting it back onto the internet.
There is only so much YOASOBI can do themselves, ikura said. Ultimately, their control ends at the moment they release the music. After that, she wants listeners to “layer on their own story.”
It’s a fitting philosophy for a group whose rise has coincided with the collapsing borders around Japanese pop culture. A song no longer needs to stay attached to the context in which it was created. It can reach someone through an anime, a YouTube recommendation, a gaming stream, a dance, a cover, or a TikTok edit. It can travel thousands of miles before the person listening to it knows anything about the people who made it. YOASOBI can make the song. They just can’t dictate its digital life.
Once they release it into the world, their part is largely over. What happens next belongs to everyone else.