About the studio
King Records started life in January 1931 as the record department of publisher Kodansha, which tells you a lot about how tangled Japan's media conglomerates have always been. It became an independent company, King Record Co., Ltd., in November 1951, and is based in Bunkyo, Tokyo as part of the larger Otowa Group. *A publisher spinning off a record label that then spins off an anime music label, that's turtles all the way down.* King Records' most anime-relevant move came in 1981, when it launched Starchild, a dedicated anime music imprint that scored decades of soundtracks and character songs. Nearly a century after its founding as a side department of a book publisher, King Records remains one of the largest Japanese-owned record companies still standing, its anime music legacy carried forward largely through the Starchild name.