As a fixture on late-night television for more than 32 years, David Letterman has rarely been at a loss for words. A recent appearance on Letterman’s show by the singer Hatsune Miku, however, left the host dumbfounded. That’s because, unlike the other musicians who have visited the Ed Sullivan Theater over time, Miku is a humanoid — an animated character created in Japan who “sings” through a vocal synthesizer and appears onstage in 3-D projection form.
Miku’s parent company, the aptly named Crypton Future Media, is insistent that, unlike the renderings of the departed Tupac Shakur at Coachella and Michael Jackson at this year’s Billboard Music Awards, its character is not a hologram. But she is indubitably a moneymaker. Since Miku made her debut in 2007, Crypton’s staff has quadrupled in size, and sales of its Vocaloid software — which so-called “creators” can use to compose music that Miku then sings — have skyrocketed. (The latest version of the software, Vocaloid 3, costs about $163 on Crypton’s website.) To date, users have released over 100,000 songs using Miku’s “voice” and have uploaded over 170,000 videos to YouTube, many of which are — software costs aside — created for free by their users under Crypton’s Creative Commons license. The catch, of course, comes when Miku’s likeness is used for commercial purposes, in which case Crypton — and, often, a third-party label — cashes in. As Crypton’s CEO, Hiroyuki Ito, explained while speaking through a translator last week: “Once you use Hatsune Miku, that’s our property.”
The Hatsune Miku windfall doesn’t stop with downloads. The character, who is eternally 16, stands just under 5-foot-2, wears her hair in two long, electric-blue pigtails and has played for up to 10,000 people in her native Japan, is becoming something of an international phenomenon — so much so that an expo of Miku memorabilia and fan-generated art held in Jakarta earlier this year was followed by subsequent exhibitions held in Los Angeles and New York City this past week. Lady Gaga was so enamored of the character (and no doubt swayed by her 2.5 million Facebook likes) that she invited Miku to open on her ARTPOP Ball tour earlier this year, and a pair of live shows — Miku’s first headlining gigs in the Eastern U.S. — are scheduled for New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom this weekend.
What does Hatsune Miku mean for the future of music? There’s little doubt that the character’s success has been fueled by a growing otaku (Japanese for people obsessed with anime and manga) community; last weekend’s Hatsune Miku Expo overlapped with New York Comic Con, which drew over 150,000 sci-fi, comic book and anime enthusiasts (many of them costumed) to the Javits Center over the course of four days. And machine-generated popular music is nothing new; many of today’s biggest hits — from Disclosure’s “Latch” to Beyoncé’s “XO” — are littered with digital loops and blips. Outside of hip-hop, which has carried the mantle of popular music’s most creative genre since the ’90s, few styles have carved out as much musical real estate in the past decade as electronic and EDM. So perhaps Hatsune Miku represents the inevitable. To quote Miku herself — or, more accurately, the Vocaloid producer kz, who penned “Packaged,” one of her earliest hits — “It’s reaching you, right? It’s echoing, isn’t it?”
Hatsune Miku plays New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom Oct. 17 and 18, 311 W. 34th St., mikuexpo.com.
