Twenty-four-year-old performer Hikari always wanted to be a singer, but never knew how to go about sharing her voice with the world. She had opportunities to become an idol-pop artist through her job working at a maid cafe in Akihabara, but she decided to avoid this conventional route into entertainment due to her lack of dancing skills.

Instead, Hikari, who asks to only be identified by her first name for privacy reasons, chose a digital path that’s becoming more common. YouTubers and other artists covering Japanese songs — whether they be fan projects such as Korean duo Darlim & Hamabal, organized efforts from labels such as Tokimeki Records, or hybrids like Indonesian singer Rainych Ran — are spreading Japanese music farther than ever before, both thanks to the type of music that grabs the spotlight and how the songs are distributed.

The engine is anime. This corner of Japanese pop culture has been seeing record growth in recent years. As a result, anime’s popularity is helping raise the fortunes of other cultural corners, like the music industry.

“The adults and teens who love anime are now discovering more about Japanese music and culture as a whole,” according to a post on the Spotify blog explaining an increase in streams of anime songs, with the themes from shows like “Attack on Titan” and “Jujutsu Kaisen” performing well on streaming viral charts. Access — once a challenge for Japanese music across the board — has become much easier.

Hikari is a beneficiary of this trend. At the start of 2021, she launched Singing Cosplayer Hikari, a multiplatform project anchored by her YouTube channel and involving a team helping her film and edit her work. She covers anime themes and staples of the singing-synthesizer-powered Vocaloid community, often against a backdrop of temples, castles and cherry blossoms, which J-vloggers love.

“I want to share more than just temples in my videos,” Hikari says. “I want to show all kinds of plants and flowers, for example. Mostly, I want to share things that you can only do in Japan. The sort of things that make someone want to travel here.”