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Diehard fans turn virtual teen singer into Japanese mega-star
She wears extremely short skirts, sports blue pigtails to her knees and has the boundless energy of a playful puppy. During her 10-year career, she's released more than 100,000 songs in a variety of languages and opened shows for Lady Gaga. And yet Hatsune Miku, who boasts 2.5 million Facebook followers, doesn't actually exist — at least not in the typical way we think of a flesh-and-blood diva. Miku is a computer-simulated pop star created more than a decade ago by Hiroyuki Ito, CEO of Crypton Future Media in Sapporo, Japan.
A virtual music star, driven by fans and voice-synthesis software. Here's a sample video, if you're curious. I can't judge the voice, since I don't speak japanese, but the animation is remarkably good.
takyon: Wikipedia for Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid. Have some fun with Miku! meme (YTP version. Warning: Gets LOUD).
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(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Monday November 06 2017, @03:00PM (1 child)
Hatsune Miku's been around for awhile now, and actually there's an entire group of related characters associated with different products.
The most interesting thing is actually the licensing. The main reason she's been successful isn't because she's particularly original, it is because her creators are so loose with her licensing and encourage users to generate content and share it... using the software they bought from the creators, of course.
I didn't read the article, but it's interesting to note they had trouble getting actual singers to help with the project. The singers themselves could see where this was leading and didn't want to create their own competition. In retrospect though, I think it's the recording companies that are the most concerned.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday November 06 2017, @04:25PM
I know that news doesn't necessarily have to be super-fresh to be notable and culturally relevant.
TFA from MalayMail has dateline "TOKYO, Oct. 30", but Hatsune Miku was released in 2007 [wikia.com], and the underlying Vocaloid software is from 2004 [vocaloidotaku.net]. A search on YouTube.com today for Hatsuni Miku [youtube.com] returns over four million results, some of them fully ten years old [youtube.com].
"Oh, you never heard about
diet coke and menthos[xkcd.com] Hatsuni Miku? There's this cool article..."