Software even eats pop stars: Japan’s post-Miley, crowdsourced icon

Hatsune Miku

Fans of the wildly popular Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku don’t have to worry about her causing controversy Miley Cyrus-style. Well, unless they design her to.

Just before 7 PM last Saturday night outside of the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, fans of the 16-year-old, 92-pound Hatsune Miku started lining up to see her in a 90-minute, live, laser-light-filled show, featuring any one of her thousands of songs, as well as numbers from her compatriots, the Vocaloid group. Many of the thousands of attendees were teenagers (though there were adults there, too), and a good number of them were dressed in Miku-inspired outfits with bright teal pigtails and skirts with thigh-high tights.

Hatsune Miku, "a voice that humanity can only dream of." Image courtesy of AA, Flickr Creative Commons.

Hatsune Miku, “a voice that humanity can only dream of.” Image courtesy of AA, Flickr Creative Commons.

Earlier that day, the Hatsune Miku Expo kicked off with art exhibitions and booths selling merchandise. The night before, Hatsune Miku performed on David Letterman, her live debut on national American television. The weekend after she would head to New York for two performances at a huge stadium.

Inside the L.A. stadium that night, shrieking fans waved glow sticks wildly as the celebrity’s appearance drew closer. A huge screen to the right of the stage showed an image of the Vocaloid group being “uploaded.” Then all of a sudden, Hatsune Miku appeared onstage in an explosion of glittering light: a 5’2″ bit of fanciful software matched to synthesized vocals, backed up by a live band and projected for the adoration of thousands (see my cell phone video below).

Birth of the remixed pop star

You may not have heard of her, but at this point in Hatsune Miku’s career — seven years after she was created — she’s a blockbuster in Japan (with hit video games, sold out shows, #1 singles and a virtual opera). She’s gradually becoming more famous in the U.S., too; she opened up for Lady Gaga earlier this year, and this tour is one of her biggest pushes in the U.S. to date.

She was created by the song synthesizer company Crypton Future Media, which is based in Sapporo, Japan, and which manufactured her and the Vocaloid group as visual representations of their song-making software. It’s not as weird as it sounds, since pretty much every organization in Japan gets a cute character to represent it (from Japan’s police forces to national blood donation campaigns).

But essentially she was born as a total marketing gimmick. Crypton Future Media named her Miku, which means future, and Hatsune, which means “first sound” — she’s the first sound from the future.

For her live performances, she’s often called “a hologram” and the software that is her virtual self is projected onto a glass screen, which you can see slightly in my cell phone video and on the Letterman Show. Hardcore techies looking for sophisticated CGI effects like the one that gave Tupac life at Coachella, or next-gen 3D holograms like Princess Leia, will be disappointed in Hatsune Miku’s actual image. She’s flat, and looks more like a life-sized, animated and pretty repetitive anime character. A friend I brought to the show got bored and left early.

But for Hatsune Miku’s fans, it’s not really about what her live performance looks like. It’s about the open source, remix community that has emerged around Miku and exploded online. It’s also about the community of Miku fans that dress up in her image, obsessively make art, create their own songs, swap collectibles and crazily pound their glow sticks throughout the entirety of Miku’s shows. The crowd at the Nokia stadium was on its feet the entire time.

Doll of Hatsune Miku, image courtesy of Danny Choo, Flickr Creative Commons.

Doll of Hatsune Miku, image courtesy of Danny Choo, Flickr Creative Commons.

Crypton Future Media says that Hatsune Miku fans have created over 100,000 original songs for her, over a million pieces of art and 170,000 YouTube videos. Google “Hatsune Miku fan site” and you get close to 150,000 hits.

Anyone can use the company’s software to create songs and to tweak her image (via Creative Commons) in whatever medium they want. Media site Polygon points out that Justin Bieber can create only a tiny fraction of the content that Hatsune Miku can crowdsource in a year’s time. Other artists, like Lady Gaga, Pharrell, and BIGHEAD, have also collaborated with and remixed her, and Hatsune Miku can perform any of these fan-created or collaborated songs during her live performances.

Crypton Future Media CEO Hiroyuki Itoh told the Creators Project recently:

“I think [Hatsune Miku] is an ambassador between the ‘read-only’ world of the 20th century, in which people were only passive receptors of culture, and a new ‘read-and-write’ world, in which people can become cultural emitters as well.”

Hatsune Mike isn’t the first musician to embrace this open source, remix culture. Modern music genres like hip hop and club music are based largely on remixing what’s out there. The Grateful Dead encouraged live recordings, content sharing, fan-created art and community around its live events, and the band remains a cultural icon decades later.

Hitomi dressed at Hatsune Miku, image courtesy of Ricardo, Flickr Creative Commons.

Hitomi dressed at Hatsune Miku. Photo by Ricardo, Flickr Creative Commons.

But Hatsune Miku has taken things a step further and virtualized the entire idea of the band itself. She’s not based on a human being, and Crypton Future Media never gave her or her bandmates a back story. Fans told Wired that they really like her in part because she’s obviously not human or even human-seeming. Virtual pop stars have been attempted in Japan before, but were trying to be too human-like it seems. Hatsune Miku is just receptacle enough to hold her fan’s fantasies.

That is also where Hatsune Miku can get a little — or a lot — creepy. There were a fair number of men at the L.A. show, and fan-art, collectibles and videos range from the slightly sexualized — short skirt, thigh-highs — to the highly sexualized (Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid porn is all over the internet). Her inherent sexualization is no accident (she’s a 16-year-old in a tiny skirt that keeps flipping up), but then neither is that of any manufactured female pop star.

And the fact that Hatsune Miku is an utterly manufactured product is what makes her so interesting for the future of pop music and culture. Real pop stars are often completely created by record label marketing and branding teams — as the world glimpses occasionally through legal disputes, or lip-synch fiascos. And Justin Bieber’s unraveling is a reminder of just how human celebrities really are.

Which makes Hatsune Miku actually a more honest and transparent pop star. While singers like to say they’re nothing without their fans, Hatsune Miku really isn’t anything — other than a bit of software — without her fans. She’s more like a network connecting her fans. She’s the experience that her fans have making art, dressing up and swapping songs.

Marc Andreessen is often quoted as having said “software is eating the world.” In Japan these days, and maybe someday in the rest of the world, software has eaten the pop star.

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