Why do animes always play a limited quantity of soundtracks through all the anime?


Most of the animes I've seen repeat a limited set of soundtracks over and
over. It gets annoying after a while. With soundtracks I refer to the music
that is played in the anime, not the opening and ending theme. I think this is
a weak spot of animes. Here are some examples:

  * Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
  * Death Note
  * Dragon Ball Z

Why is this?




This is from my understanding with music for game development. However, most
are practically the same with anime as they are both mediums that use music to
help engage the audience.

Each track costs so much and the price varies due to the length of a track and
the number of revisions of that track. It would cost a while lot to create new
tracks every time

Like with video games, music can help identify situations. As such, if one
first sees some romantic scene where two characters go to kiss but don't, when
one hears that same score again when the two characters are just talking, one
can start to think "oh my god, they might confess to each other this time."
Likewise in a fight, some anime have different tracks for fighting music based
on how intense the battle will be so, when you start to hear that same music
you can expect how epic a battle might be (just like with boss music in video
games).

Music can set the mood to make you feel for the characters and what they are
feeling, e.g.

> in Fate Stay/Night anime when Rin, regardless on how much she got hurt,
> embraced Sakura and regretted how she wasn't much of a big sister by not
> doing anything to stop Sakura from being adopted out by the Matous (more of
> an impact for those who know what Sakura went though and that Rin was also
> blaming herself for Sakura's abuse)

By changing these more often you tend to lose the immersion and impact in some
key scenes.

