Aoi Shouta (蒼井翔太), nicknamed Shoutan, is a Japanese voice actor, actor and singer. After a few years working as a singer under the name SHOWTA, he redebuted as a voice actor under his current stage name and shortly after restarted his music career. He is best known for his high-pitched voice that allows him to play characters of various genders (awk., not sure how to word this), his angelic falsetto, and his androgynous style.
For several reasons this page is going to focus on music. First of all, Shouta's voice acting career is still largely focused on singing, so whenever he's cast in anime he's usually either singing in character or doing the opening or ending theme song. Secondly, I am a weirdo who listens to songs from music anime and games without actually consuming the source material. So, obviously I know a lot more about the songs Shouta has sung for these franchises than the franchises or characters themselves.
This is going to be very opinion-based with me giving my personal recommendations and thoughts. If you want a more objective or comprehensive read try this article or good old Wikipedia.
Note that with Japanese record labels and media companies being slow on the uptake with making content freely globally available, a lot of it is region-locked, pay-walled in a fanclub, or straight up only avaliable in physical format. In fact, all of Shouta's music was region-locked for me on Spotify until 2020, and even now only about half is avaliable (other countries or streaming services may be different idk). Seeing as I don't have the money to import numerous thirty-plus-dollar Japanese CDs, I am not above scrounging up content where I can find it on YouTube/bilibili/soundcloud/wherever. So, I may link some of those here, although I'll always use an official version or officially released live recording whenver possible.
years?
After coming in as a finalist on a televised singing contest for teens, Shouta drew the attention of King Records and signed on with them under the stage name SHOWTA. His music focused on relaxation/healing, and so drew from soft pop, R&B and folk sounds. He also released a few covers of kayokyoku songs.
years?
After a year (ish?) hiatus, SHOWTA returned as voice actor Aoi Shouta. He found success with Uta no prince sama and then signed on with the associated label, Broccoli. His music was handled by Elements Garden, the same compositional group responsible for UtaPri (also known for BangDream and Symphogear among others). Their signature style is busy high-tempo pop with lots of synths, a total 180 from his previous work. Although, they also wrote him some nice ballads and even a pop-rock number.
years?
In 2016 (?) Shouta transferred from Broccoli to its parent label King Records, joining fellow seiyuu like Miyano Mamoru and Mizuki Nana. No longer limited to Elements Garden, he branched out to a variety of composers and touched on some new music genres.
More specifically anything sung in character from music anime and games, stage musicals, etc. This man is in like a billion of them so these are just my favorites.
put in chronological order! add character and group names?
note that prince kaguya and smile mermaid songs aren't included here because they were released under his actual name.
Ok not technically in character since they're more like ost/inserts that happen to have vocals. But they were released with the OST and not by Shouta, and I don't really know where else to put them so here they are.
I'm constantly shocked by how many songs I unironically enjoy from this franchise, although I've only actually heard a fraction of them.
This franchise has some of the absolute weirdest english lyrics I've heard in jpop, which is saying a lot.
duets with toyonaga toshiyuki. A lot of songs from this game have a bit of jazzy or even musical theater feel to them which is cool.
Each character/va was paired up with a vocaloid producer for this project which is a really cool idea? Shouta got Yuyoyuppe, who btw remixed a song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIuT_eun5ao) for the Persona 3 dancing game that the protag dances to. The same protag that Shouta played in the p3 musicals. Full circle!
Tbh Shouta's band is not my favorite from this franchise but they got a few good ones ig.
Never ever did I expect Shouta to play a buff shirtless cat (?) boy who sings hard rock music.
The anime adaptation of this game was so infamously bad it got a Sakugabooru blog written about it, which is actually quite an accomplishment since pretty much all the other articles are about good shows. It even coined a Japanese slang term for bad animation? The songs are actually pretty cool tho, a kind of strange minimalistic electronic rock.
Putting aside if these songs are actual visual kei or not...
Round up for franchises with only one song I wanna talk about.
Mostly from live performances (concerts, music shows)
Maybe they're not all meant to be jokes but I just think they're a bit silly anyways.........
just a few, cause there's not many with subs anyways