SixTONES' New Era

 It has been announced that SixTONES have an upcoming single with the title track called, New Era, which will be used as the opening of the upcoming anime series Yashahime" Princess Half-Demon. The single is being released in November, though the exact date has not been announced yet. There is no preview of the song yet, so it will most likely first be heard with the airing of the first episode of the series on October 3rd. 

Johnny's Net announcement

I was hoping that we would be getting one more single from SixTONES before the end of the year so I was glad to see the rumors about this were true. I hope like with Navigator the single has a mix of new and Junior songs as the B-sides for it. 

While I do not see anime tie-ins being some of the bigger tie-ins for a song seeing how people have reacted to this news has shown why Sony/Johnny's seems to be going this way for SixTONES. Internationally anime is one of the most well known and popular cultural products Japan has so it makes sense that a group Johnny's wants to have an international presence would use that as an advantage. It does not take a lot of searching to notice people bringing up the fact that V6 did the OP for Inuyasha so having SixTONES doing the OP for Yashahime seems fitting. So these theme songs are a good way to get the group noticed overseas at least. 

That said, Sony and Johnny's really need to at least get the single title tracks for SixTONES up on international streaming sites. While having the music videos on Youtube is great, music streaming plays too big of a role in people's listening habits to be ignored and could help with building the traction from these songs' tie-ins.

As a side note, one part of this that I find interesting is that it looks like this series has Sony Music Japan as the music label sponsor for this series, compared to Avex being the music label sponsor of the Inuyasha anime. As not only is SixTONES doing the OP theme another Sony artist, Uru, is doing the ED theme. Of course in the end it does not mean much outside of the fact that any artist that will be doing any possible future OP and ED themes will be Sony artists, so SixTONES will be the only possible Johnny's.