This is another topic I wrote on the other blog back in February,
but I think I will further ellaborate here so I'll rewrite here as well.
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I think lots of people are writing about Hatsune-Miku nowadays
but it seems that there still are people who has never seen nor heard of it,
so I would like to briefly summarize what is happening here.
1)What is Hatsune-Miku?
It is a DTM (Desktop Music) software created by Crypton Future Media.
It was released in 2007,and was the best selling DTM software.
-DTM software that sells 1000 copies are supposed to be hit- Hatsune-Miku sold 30,000.
Its price is 140USD (15,000JPY)
According to BCN, Hatsune-Miku got nearly 30% of the share of DTM music,
and won the sound related software div. of BCN ranking last year.
Crypton has released their second product of the Character Vocaloid series: Kagamine-Rin/Ren.
I think Hatsune-Miku is creating a completely new phenomena,
where people who had never created music (just listens or hums or sings in Karaoke etc)
started creating original music using Hatsune-Miku.
Just like what blogs did in text world, what Youtube did in video world,
Hatsune-Miku has created consumer generated "music" market in Japan
-although it is a very smaller number of people compared to blogs and videos-
It stimulated people’s creativity, not only did people create music,
but people who heard the music started to draw
amazing pictures, animes, and 3DCGs etc for the music.
2) Why was Hatsune-Miku so successful?
Hatsune-Miku is not just a "software", but it has a character “Miku”
which you can see the picture as above, and its profile.
It is more like a virtual idol, and people who loved Miku started using the software
and it became to have a viral effect.
The voice is that of a very popular anime voice actor, Saki Fujita.
Quality of the software itself was good in that it was using "Vocaloid" software
which was originally developed by YAMAHA.
You can easily create songs and make Miku (with a cute voice) sing it for you
- which stimulated user's motivation.
"Nico Nico Douga" and its community contributed to the success of Hatsune-Miku largely.
3) Examples of various clips created by users
You might notice that the quality of the songs are so good- and yet they are created by users.
others started to put pictures for that music, animes for that music,
and even 3DCGs for the music and the quality of those contents are AMAZING.
Examples of Miku 3DCG videos can be seen as follows:
... you need to log into Nico Nico Douga, but anyways you'd need to learn Japanese first
to understand the lectures so I won't go into this further :)
With the love towards Miku, people started to create various things.
Miku sings Levan Polkka
The song is not original, but someone made this anime
that Miku plays around with onion and this onion became
the "sign" of Miku and spread throught the community.
Also, this cute deforme Miku came to be called "Hachune-Miku"
which like a baby pronunciation of "Hatsune-Miku".
(they are not paid...!) is really really amazing.
...also, the music and songs that people created for Miku became popular
and people started to sing or play instruments of those Miku-original music in the real world.
"Miku miku ni shiteageru" orchestra version
Played "Melt" with recorders
Black Rock Shooter (Hatsune-Miku original song)
Two guys sang this song, and someone remixed Miku and the two guys' songs
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