Hatsune Miku "Debuted" 10 Years Ago. How Did a Piece of Voice Software Become an Idol?

She has driven a consumer market worth more than 10 billion yen, drawn attention from around the world, and stayed popular for a decade — genuinely astonishing.

More than 40 concerts worldwide, every one sold out;

The single Tell Your World released in 217 countries and regions, a record for the widest digital release by any Japanese artist;

Lady Gaga's favorite electropop star;

Endorsement deals with LV, the Toyota Corolla, Google, Sony, Xiaomi, FamilyMart...

Ten years after her debut, Hatsune Miku and her signature leek-green twin tails are still going strong.

A voice-processing program became a virtual idol and drew this much attention: that alone is astonishing. It also built a large market. Japan's Nomura Research Institute puts consumer spending tied to Hatsune Miku at more than 10 billion yen, enough to make her the most successful virtual singer working today.

"Breathing a soul into something with no life in it." That is how Hiroyuki Itoh, president of CRYPTON FUTURE MEDIA and the man known as "the father of Hatsune Miku," summed up the secret, in an interview with the Japanese outlet ORICON NEWS marking her 10th anniversary.

None of it was an accident.

Why Was Hatsune Miku Given a Female Voice?

She is a VOCALOID, developed by CRYPTON FUTURE MEDIA (hereafter "CRYPTON") on top of Yamaha's VOCALOID voice-synthesis software. Before her there had been VOCALOIDs that flopped or never caught on. In 2004 the British company ZERO-G released two of them, LEON and LOLA, one male voice and one female. Sales were dismal. One reason widely blamed for the failure was the cover art: too realistic, with lifelike lips that gave off a "professionals only, keep out" feeling and did nothing to help the product spread.

CRYPTON went the other way, using the anime art style Japanese buyers took to more easily for a female VOCALOID called "MEIKO." It sold more than 3,000 copies, at a time when 1,000 copies counted as excellent for a voice-processing program.

Sales that good convinced CRYPTON the anime look was right. The male-voiced "KAITO" followed in 2006 and got a cold reception. CRYPTON quickly worked out that almost everyone buying MIDI music software was male, and after two tries arrived at a formula that worked: anime art plus a female voice.

That is how "VOCALOID2 Hatsune Miku" arrived on August 31, 2007 — short skirt, the two signature leek-green ponytails, soft and cute.

In its first two weeks the software sold at least 3,500 copies; a year later the figure hit a record 42,000. More important, Hatsune Miku broke the old pattern in which MIDI music software was bought mainly by professionals. She had fans of her own.

A survey by the Yano Research Institute in September 2016 counted about 680,000 VOCALOID otaku in Japan, who had been fans for 4.4 years on average. The 20-to-29 bracket was the largest at 35.9%, followed by those 19 and under at 25.6%; the 30-to-39 and 40-to-49 brackets came in around 10% each.

By gender, men dominated, at 60.3%.

So Hatsune Miku's fans sit at the center of Japan's otaku consumer market: men who avoid socializing with real people. The virtual idols they favor have changed from era to era, but a pretty, cute face has always been mandatory.

The classic Japanese science-fiction anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross had one — Lynn Minmay, a beautiful idol with an angelic voice. She released the songs she sang in the show the way any real singer would, and her records once reached No. 7 on Oricon's weekly chart. She was, in the fullest sense, the otaku goddess of the 1980s.

In 1994 the game company KONAMI released Tokimeki Memorial, the ancestor of the dating-sim genre. Its heroine, Shiori Fujisaki, was smart, beautiful, a top student and good at sports on top of that; otaku fell for this perfect idol fast. KONAMI built her an official fan club, "Friends of Shiori," and put out 33 issues of an official magazine between 1996 and 2002.

Fan Works Gave Hatsune Miku a Rich, Shifting Image and Personality, and Gave Fans the Feeling of "Raising" and "Playing" Her

But Lynn Minmay and Shiori Fujisaki both came with a concrete character already written for them. Hatsune Miku did not. Officially she was given only an age (16), a height (158 cm), and a weight (42 kg). Everything else was left to the fans, which opened up a space for doujin work that had no precedent.

Japan has a mature doujin market. Good fan works bring the original property more fans, and although they brush against copyright, publishers and animation studios mostly look the other way. CRYPTON, which owns the rights to Hatsune Miku, was more generous still: it built piapro, a site where fans could post and trade their own creations.

Within Hatsune Miku's fan scene, the people who write the music are called "VOCALOIDP," and the artists who draw her are called "eshi." One side supplies the music, the other the image. That is what made her such a rich, shifting virtual singer.

In melt, written and composed by ryo, she is a 16-year-old girl in love who becomes a human's girlfriend. In Convenience Store, by cokesi procesor, she turns into a storyteller instead.

Anyone writing for her can ignore the limits of the human voice. However high or hard the note, she can sing it. Whatever image you want to give her, you write the lyrics to match. Making music becomes as much fun as playing a character-raising game.

The eshi have just as much freedom. What Hatsune Miku wears and what personality she shows are entirely their call. Her most famous image, waving a leek, came out of a fan work.

Put it in the terms of a singer, her producer, and her stylist: the VOCALOIDP is Hatsune Miku's producer, and the eshi is her stylist.

Like-minded VOCALOIDP and eshi also form groups to create together. The best known is supercell. In March 2009 they released their self-titled album supercell, which sold 56,000 copies in a week and reached No. 4 on Oricon's weekly chart, beating the No. 7 their predecessor Lynn Minmay had managed.

AKB48 runs on the same model of handing control to the fans, except with real people. Where a member stands in a song's choreography, how many TV shows she appears on, how many dramas she gets cast in — the amount and quality of what the industry calls "resources" are decided entirely by fan votes. As long as fans are willing to spend on a member, their money can carry her to the center spot everyone is watching.

A model this interactive, this much like a character-raising game, can win a lot of devoted, fanatical fans.

And a virtual idol has one thing over a real one that makes her more perfect: you never have to worry about her "private life." Hatsune Miku will never generate a scandal that leaves fans feeling "betrayed." She is an idol her fans can relax around.

Born at the Right Moment

Even CRYPTON president Hiroyuki Itoh has admitted in an interview that Hatsune Miku caught a good moment.

YouTube and niconico, the first of the bullet-comment video sites, launched in 2005 and 2006. They became the two biggest platforms carrying her. Niconico Douga in particular found its footing in 2007, the year she was born.

In January 2007 niconico was still running on servers belonging to YouTube and other video sites, and users could upload only low-resolution clips of up to 100MB and under 10 minutes. In March it got its own servers. On July 15 it had its first video to pass 1 billion plays. On July 25 its registered users passed 2 million for the first time, with 54,000 paying members.

On September 4 and September 20, two videos blew up on niconico: "Let's Have VOCALOID2 Hatsune Miku Sing Ievan Polkka" (Chinese fans usually call it the "Leek Song") and "I'll Mikumiku You." You may not be a Hatsune Miku fan, but the odds are good that you have heard both. They were simply that big.

"Beyond the Limits of Technology, I've Come to See You"

Had it stopped at still images set to video, Hatsune Miku probably would not have reached the popularity she has. Every large wave of new fans she has gathered came with a new piece of technology, each one like finishing an evolution.

By 2009 niconico was carrying music videos of fairly high quality, and the music VOCALOIDP made now had MVs that could show the world inside the song. A moving MV obviously pulls in fans more easily than a still picture.

Credit goes to niconico opening up the H.264 format, with its far higher compression ratio, in 2008. Take a raw file of 88GB: compressed under the MPEG-2 standard it becomes 3.5GB, a ratio of 25:1; under H.264 it shrinks to 879MB, an astonishing 102:1. Because it needed so much less bandwidth, eshi produced a flood of beautiful videos and posted them to niconico.

Also in 2009, Hatsune Miku held her first solo concert at Tokyo's STUDIO COAST. More than 2,000 people came, and a new era for virtual idols began.

Rear projection threw her every move, singing and dancing, onto a transparent panel. Japan has a fan-support culture all its own (the current word for it is "calling"), and the whole hall waved leek-green glow sticks together to cheer her on.

She was no longer just a virtual idol on niconico, and certainly not just a hologram on a panel. She became a real idol who existed only inside that space she shared with her fans. "Walking out of the venue and back into the real world, it felt like waking from a dream." That is what many fans said afterward.

One fan, Aono.Y, used 23 projectors to throw 23 specially composited CG images. The technique made Hatsune Miku more three-dimensional than she had ever been, a glasses-free 3D effect. After he uploaded it to niconico, viewers filled the bullet comments with "This is a new world!" In the video he wrote a line that speaks for every Hatsune Miku fan: "Beyond the limits of technology, I've come to see you."

From Fan Frenzy to the Mass Market

What carried Hatsune Miku out of the fan frenzy and into public view was the Sapporo Snow Festival. One of the world's four great snow festivals, it draws about 2 million visitors to Sapporo each year for five days in February, when the snow is heaviest. The city had long been looking for ways to raise its profile — until officials noticed that CRYPTON, the company behind the Hatsune Miku software, was a Sapporo company itself.

The Sapporo city government and CRYPTON then built the "Snow Miku" character together (Snow Miku can be read as one more large-scale piece of Hatsune Miku fan work). Instead of the leek green of the original, Snow Miku is keyed to cold blues and whites that feel like winter, with snow crystals in her hair and on her clothes.

The Snow Miku ice sculptures on display around the city, along with the Snow Miku Nendoroid from the figure company GOOD SMILE, generated more online talk than anything before. The two sides agreed to keep working together in 2011, the year that marked the formal start of Hatsune Miku's commercial road.

The streetcars running through Sapporo got a special Snow Miku livery, which became one of the biggest draws of every Snow Festival after that. The streetcar company's shop set an all-time sales record on Hatsune Miku merchandise; a limited run of 2,400 Snow Miku zoo tickets and 600 Snow Miku plush dolls at Maruyama Park sold out; and with Hatsune Miku as its face, even the Sapporo International Short Film Festival got more press coverage.

The Big Brands Came Quickly

In March 2011 Toyota launched the 11th-generation Corolla in the United States. In the ad, Hatsune Miku drives a Corolla to a concert and, to a hall full of fans cheering her on, sings her single World Is Mine — a song so well known among fans that they call her, affectionately, "the world's number-one princess."

Presale tickets for her July concert in Los Angeles sold out in two weeks, and as many as 6,000 people came. It was her first performance outside Japan. BMW and the Japanese brand DAIHATSU came calling after that.

To crack open the Japanese browser market, Google turned to her too. In its ad, music lovers from all over the world use Google Chrome and the Hatsune Miku software to make their own music, and the closing frame reads, in perfect keeping with her creative ethos: "Everyone, creator."

In its first four days the ad passed 580,000 clicks. The theme song, Tell Your World, set off so much discussion that the digital release went out in 217 countries and regions, making Hatsune Miku the Japanese artist with the widest digital release on record. Incidentally, Google Chrome's faces in the United States at the time were Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

Even the luxury brands, always the conservative ones, came calling. In 2013 the first Asian celebrity to wear LV's new spring/summer checkerboard skirt was Hatsune Miku.

As for why, an interview with Nicolas Ghesquière, who later took over as LV's creative director, offers a clue: "This is no longer an age where it is enough to make beautiful clothes. They also have to make women look confident, have something with personality, and show that a woman is equal to whatever she loves doing."

After two concerts in China, in 2015 and 2016, proved her pull in the market, China was finally marked on Hatsune Miku's commercial map. From 2017 on she has turned up more and more, from phone makers and banks down to mobile games.

In February 2017 Xiaomi released a limited-edition Hatsune Miku Redmi Note 4X, and gave Bilibili the exclusive presale for the entire internet (Bilibili hosts a great deal of Hatsune Miku fan work reposted from niconico).

In August, China Merchants Bank's credit card arm, which has always presented itself as young, launched a "Hatsune Miku Fan Credit Card." It called itself an AR credit card: download the China Merchants Bank app, scan the card, and a 3D Hatsune Miku appears. It sounded very cool.

In gaming, the field closest to her own concept, NetEase Games put out a dress-up mobile game called Hatsune Speed, and Shanda Games' mobile title Kannazuki signed her as its spokesperson.

Hatsune Miku's fans are mostly teenagers and people in their twenties, and being a virtual idol is distinctive enough that when a company wants both a younger user base and some cool marketing, she is a choice that is hard to get wrong. Judged by the standards for a flesh-and-blood endorser, she measures up perfectly well. Jonathan Schenker, CEO of Bookmark Entertainment, told QDaily in an interview: "As a widely loved fictional character, she already has an emotional bond with consumers and with brands."

On how Hatsune Miku should be run from here, CRYPTON president Hiroyuki Itoh puts it this way: "Keeping the open atmosphere of users creating on their own initiative, and showing people a personality, is what matters." That, after all, is exactly where her appeal comes from.

Cover image via YouTube