Two different businesses get called "the studio" in casual conversation, and they have almost opposite incentives. The production company plans, finances and shoots titles, owns the resulting master, and needs a steady supply of castable performers. The talent agency represents the performer, negotiates on her behalf across every company she works with, and needs her career to outlast any single contract.

Almost everything confusing about the industry's structure — why one company runs a dozen competing labels, why a performer moves between labels but keeps the same profile page, why a name can change while a face does not — resolves once you separate these roles.

Who actually does what?

Five distinct functions, frequently collapsed into one word:

Function Japanese term Responsibility Visible where
Parent group — Owns multiple labels; handles sales, rights and distribution deals Rarely on the cover
Production company (maker) メーカー Plans, casts, finances, shoots, owns the master Label logo
Label レーベル Editorial identity, house style, series, code prefix Code prefix, cover design
Talent agency プロダクション / 事務所 Recruits, represents, negotiates, schedules, handles publicity Agency profile page
Platform / retailer — Sells and streams the finished title under licence The site you buy it on

The one to internalise is the split between the third and fourth rows. A label controls the work; an agency controls the relationship with the person. Neither controls the other, and their contracts are renegotiated on different clocks.

How does a title actually get made?

The pipeline runs through the agency at exactly one point — casting — and that single hand-off explains most of the industry's structure.

  1. Planning. A label decides on a series entry or a concept, with a budget and a slot in its release calendar.
  2. Casting request. The label approaches agencies with a brief. For a label with contracted performers, the "brief" may simply be the next release in an existing exclusive term.
  3. Negotiation. The agency negotiates terms, schedule and conditions on the performer's behalf. The performer is a party to this, not a bystander.
  4. Production. The label shoots and finishes the title. Costs and creative control sit with the label.
  5. Code allocation. The title receives a prefix and number from the label's numbering line — which is why codes identify labels rather than people.
  6. Distribution. The parent group or the label licenses the finished title to platforms and retailers.

We describe the flow and deliberately omit the numbers. Anyone quoting precise fee splits without a source is repeating forum lore.

Why does a performer stay with one agency but move between labels?

Because the two relationships are built for different timescales. A label contract is a fixed-term arrangement about releases. An agency relationship is an ongoing management arrangement about a career.

Practical consequences you can actually observe:

  • Label moves are routine; agency moves are less frequent. A filmography crossing several labels does not indicate instability.
  • Agency profiles are the more stable biographical source. A label's page for a performer is usually promotional and tied to her contract period; an agency page tends to persist across contracts.
  • Sibling labels share pipelines. When several labels sit under one parent group, casting can move between them without the performer changing agency or even changing contact points.
  • Stage names can change with a label move. Name-based search breaks at that boundary. Face-based search does not.

What is the difference between a parent group, a maker and a label?

A hierarchy, not synonyms:

Layer Scope What changes when it changes
Parent group Owns and distributes several makers/labels Distribution deals, corporate structure — usually invisible to viewers
Maker Produces the work Who finances and controls the shoot
Label Editorial line inside a maker House style, series, code prefix

This is why the studio pages on this site are organised by label. The label is the layer that produces observable differences: you can see it in the code prefix, in the cover design, and in the way a title is shot. See the major studios overview for how the main labels are positioned relative to each other, and PRESTIGE for a case where the maker runs as its own group rather than as a label inside someone else's portfolio.

Why does this structure matter when you are trying to trace a filmography?

Because it tells you where the discontinuities will be, and every one of them is a place where naive searching fails.

Discontinuity Caused by What breaks
New code prefix Label retires a numbering line Prefix-based browsing
Different label Contract ended, agency booked elsewhere Label-based browsing
Different stage name Re-debut or label move Name-based search entirely
Missing from a platform Licensing deal, not contract status Availability checks
Compilation appearance Repackaged older footage Chronology, release dates

The last two catch people out constantly. A title vanishing from one storefront says nothing about the performer; it is a licensing matter between the label and that platform. And a compilation release dated this year may contain footage shot many years earlier under a long-retired prefix.

What does our own data say about this — and what can it not say?

It can identify people across those discontinuities. It cannot describe industry volume.

Our index, as of the 2026-08 snapshot, holds 241,792 faces drawn from 106 sites, resolving to 2,333 named performers, with similar-performer data covering 89% of them. Because matching runs on face geometry — a 512-dimension vector compared by cosine similarity, threshold 0.40 — it survives a stage-name change, a label move and a change of art direction, all of which defeat text search.

The boundary, stated plainly. The sampling is skewed: 2,246 of the 2,333 named performers have their representative image from a single source site, so this measures exposure in our sources rather than anyone's output. Biographical coverage is partial — birth date 56%, bust size 59%, debut date 59%, height 57%, measurements 56%, birthplace 31%. And we hold no release database at all, so we will never tell you how many titles a label or a performer has produced. The most we can honestly say is "titles we have indexed", which is a statement about our crawl.

Related questions

Names change, labels change, prefixes change. Faces do not — search by face, with detection running in your browser and only a cropped region sent for matching.