Corolla Miku, presented in , wears slightly different attire compared to KEI's original design: instead of one skirt stripe and single floating ribbons, she now has two, as was intended by the client. In , Crypton began to focus on marketing Miku to U. When the song finally went on sale, it came 7th in the top 10 World singles list on iTunes in its first week of sales. Hatsune Miku". Crypton had to consider who they were aiming the advertisements of Miku at mostly the web fanbase and had to check the differences between the Japanese and English fan communities.
Since Crypton had always sold Miku as a virtual instrument in Japan, they asked their Japanese fan base if it was acceptable for them to sell her as a virtual singer to the new market audience. Crypton Future Media do not approve of using Miku in politics. This is, so far, one of the biggest areas of marketing that Miku has avoided being used for. Despite this, her mascot was not used; instead, a pink twin-tailed girl dubbed Android Rui replaced her. Crypton Future Media also applied for trademark on the 26th of June When the tsunami hit Japan in , Miku was chosen as a character who would help represent Japan.
This was because of how common her image was appearing with many younger people knowing who she was. She was already in music based textbooks and her influence on music was heavily known by the Minister for Education for Japan.
The fact that products with Miku can sell out quickly makes her attractive to even slow growing industries. Products with Miku on them can even sell out in public events within 30 minutes of events opening to the public. This helps fuel marketing in even handcrafted trades, as fans are attracted to these "one of a kind" products.
The initial sales of Hatsune Miku were so high that Crypton could not keep up with the demand. In the first 12 days of sale, nearly 3, sales reservations were made. This was around one sale in in the music software industry, quoted as "an impossible number" by Wataru Sasaki — the person in charge of the planning and production.
To add perspective, normally selling 1, copies of a synthesizing software was considered good business. Miku's Append was not as well received as her original voicebank, though it managed to stay in the top ten products from Crypton Future Media. However, it disappeared from the list entirely from time to time. Despite this, it has been known to have reached the top 3 products on occasion, as well as to knock other CV vocals further down the charts.
For example, in August it was in 10th place, the following month it went up to 6th place. Hatsune Miku V3 was reported to have over saturated Yamaha's servers with requests for activation upon release. Other Vocaloid products sold by Cryton Future Media ended up being misplaced from their normal ranking spots.
This was the first time the Vocaloid products had been impacted drastically since their charts began. For most of , Hatsune Miku's V3 and Hatsune Miku V3 complete packages held the 1st and 2nd spot of the product rankings. In both and , a number of Miku products took the top 10 sales rankings of Vocaloid packages sold on Crypton's Sonicwire download store. In , the Hatsune Miku English package held 7th place, while the Hatsune Miku V3 package held 2nd and the English bundle version 1st.
However, not everything produced for Miku is highly successful. Aside from the original Hatsune Miku tone of voice, her "Dark" tone voicebank, Miku's vocals have had far less popularity with "Vivid" and "Light" being later dropped in her V4x release altogether. The voice itself had become become a "standard" vocal for the engine by her V4x release, with Miku becoming "The Vocaloid". The bundle claimed 1st place while Megurine Luka V3X held 3rd place. Nico Nico Douga played a fundamental role in the recognition and popularity of the software today.
Soon after its release, users of Nico Nico Douga started posting videos with songs created using the software. It was stated in , that videos tagged with Miku's name reached between 1, and 1, videos each month. This was by far the most videos of any Vocaloid on Nico nico Douga. According to google trends , Miku has had a fairly stable popularity since April Crypton had well-established connections with sound production companies overseas and we initially planned to get in touch with several companies and develop the product in English, and then in Japanese, Spanish, and other languages.
But we found that development for the English-speaking market did not go very well. There seemed to be resistance--perhaps deriving from religious beliefs--to the idea of "humans creating humanoids. First I explored what would be effective marketing methods, given the impression made by the word Vocaloid. Since synthesized sounds are often used in SF movies, I decided the theme should have an SF or futuristic character.
I also wanted to draw from the images of female androids that have been created by Japan's SF culture as well as graphic styles from anime and manga. Vocaloid and Vocalo are trademarks of Yamaha Corporation. First, I insisted that the voice be clear and bright--because, after all, a high-pitched, bright voice is well suited to a futuristic image.
Looking back over the history of Japanese popular music, the popular singer "idols" of a few decades ago--like Yamaguchi Momoe and Nakamori Akina--tended to sing in low registers. The voices of more recent popular singers--Onyanko Club, Morning Musume, AKB48, and the voice actresses--have become quite a bit higher in register and lighter in quality. We can see that trend not just in Japan, in fact, but worldwide. I think the voices will become even higher-pitched in the future. And I wanted the voice to be lively.
The recorded female voices you hear in taxis or trains in Japan are mechanical or synthetic sounds and have an artificial, lifeless quality. As a child, I recall hearing television narrators who spoke in an overbearing, non-human-sounding tone--that seemed kind of scary to me. The announcements over the school PA system I heard in junior high school were somewhat artificial, but the voices actually sounded rather sweet. What I wanted to aim for was that latter quality. To create Vocaloid, we record a human voice and then create a library of sound fragments for Japanese phonemes.
The software makes the Vocaloid sing by combining those sounds. In the process of mechanical manipulation of the sounds in order to smooth the transitions between the sounds, some qualities of the original voice are lost. The intonation, too, is slightly flatter than that of a human singer. What you get, therefore, is a voice with slightly different traits than the original voice. We came to understand our Vocaloid as a "virtual singer" with a distinctive voice different from what a human being would have.
So, I first began to search for the voice that would be the base for the Vocaloid. I listened to CDs of the voice actresses affiliated with the three major voice acting production studios and also collected CDs for newcomer voice actresses. Out of all those I chose the young voice actress Fujita Saki.
Her voice is quite high, but also strong and good on the sustained notes. I liked it also that it was her natural voice, reasoning that it would be more stable in the course of repeated recordings than a "performed voice. What did you want users to experience? The first goal was to give users a great tool to create their own music, with a realistically generated voice.
At the same time, we wanted to expand the range of users beyond the professional musicians, who were still the core of our customers. So we put our efforts in packaging the software, in order to give it a modern look, and root the voice in a character that would be recognisable and convey an image of the future, while having some traits of Japanese pop culture. What were you thinking about when you designed her image? Why years-old? Why a girl? Why blue pigtails, etc.? The image was designed by a young illustrator from Hokkaido — the region in Japan where our company Crypton Future Media has its headquarters — called KEI.
We gave him some basic instructions, like age, color scheme, and integrating some design elements of electronic instruments. Her signature teal color for example comes from an iconic keyboard synthesizer.
The blue pigtails were a design choice of KEI, that made her look very unique, and proved to be a very successful idea.
Why do you think users enjoy Miku so much? How are they able to interact with her in a way that is completely new and unique?
Hatsune Miku, through an open licensing scheme we have adopted, can be used freely by anyone in their own creations, as long as it is not for commercial profit. That includes her voice, but also her appearance and design. Thanks to that, thousands and thousands of fans have been making and sharing their artworks on the internet, which gives them a chance to interact not only with Miku by making her sing or dance, but with other users and fans.
Every song or illustration can give inspiration to another creator to make their own, or offer their help to improve it. Do people see themselves in Miku?
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