Hatsune Miku Recap 2011 (+recap of my Ignite talk)

Update:

This video created by Google Japan to promote Chrome is an excellent representation of the value of Hatsune Miku- I love their phrase "Everyone, Creator". (Disclaimer: I work for Google)

I have been posting and speaking a lot about Hatsune Miku in various places including this blog(2008), this blog (2010) and did Ignite at LeWeb'10.



Hatsune Miku is a Desk Top Music software and a character- it started with the "voice" and "picture" created by a company called Crypton Future Media, which generated a huge movement of DIY music, video and art phenomenon. It is one of the series of softwares called "Vocaloid".

I think the highlight of Hatsune Miku for 2011 was that it has gone international :)

Recently Hatsune Miku had been attracting attention from various countries.

LA Weekly "Hatsune Miku: Her Best Fan-Generated Videos"

Miku has also have made a very successful concert in Los Angeles- you can see the highlight video here:



Also, Vocaloid series is constantly evolving- the newest version "Vocaloid 3" which has a much human-like sound- can be listened from the link below.

鳥の詩（ Ver.IA(β) ）



Following is a recap of my Ignite speech which was one year ago (didn't have time to post this for a year...)

I started my speech by introducing Miku's concert that happened in Japan. At that time, people around the world were interested that Japanese people actually gathers to watch a virtual character to sing- this year, we have seen this happen in Los Angeles and I heard that as many as 5,000 people came to the event ;)

Video of the concert


Press articles of media around the world surprised about a concert of a virtual idol.



The most interesting thing about Hatsune Miku is how it spurred enormous amount of creativity by the users- music, pictures, animations, software, etc.

Users can upload music to various sites such as Piapro:



And some of those user generated songs won #1 of the Japanese weekly CD Sales ranking, and Vocaloid series won #2,4,6,7, 8, 10,11, 15,18 of Karaoke ranking last year.



I was looking at the data this year, and for example the Oricon Blu-ray ranking as of 2011/11/28 (data from 2011/11/14-2011/11/20) #5 was Hatsune Miku. (#1,2,4 are all Harry Potter, #3 is Pirates of the Caribbean)

Much less in Karaoke ranking compared to last year, but still #3, #19 and #21 were Hatsune Miku songs.



I played one of the most popular songs at LeWeb last year- "Miku Miku Ni Shite Ageru"



This song was remixed by many people, and the dots on this chart shows all the remixes- it actually looks like universe!



Many people started drawing illustrations -many of which you can see on Piapro



And of course various 2D animations and 3D animations.





People started creating software too- MikuMikuDance is the most popular one- user generated 3D animation creation software.



Originally it only had one character (Miku) but the different versions allowed users to add different characters, objects and backgrounds, and different models as you can see in the following videos:





MMD started to carry physical engine, and the users can control objects’ weight, friction, spinning speed, speed decay, repulsion, etc. MMD development by the original creator- Yu Higuchi has ended as of October 2011, and MMD's further development is now in the hands of the MMD community.



Then there's the 3D animation and hardware hacking part. This video of "Innocence" started the movement.



You can see this imaginary musical instrument- which stimulated the geeks around Japan to actually create it.

Awesome wall paper made by tripshots



Created that instrument with 3$ display:


Nintendo DS version:


Wii remote version:


Augmented Reality version:


As you can imagine, there are Android app version such as this one and this one :)

At Digital Contents Expo, a bunch of creators gathered to show off their instruments and did a mini live.



I believe the key to the success of Hatsune Miku was its openness- Crypton Future Media could've claimed their rights and prohibited the use of the characters- as many of the contents industry companies does- instead they decided to open up the use of the character Miku, and invited various creators to share, reuse and remix their creativity- which led to a viral effect not just by consumers, but creators, and also made consumers to become creators.

What I really like about the Hatsune Miku community is that they have love and respect with each other, they like other people's work, praise, and build on top of them for the next great thing - and the following was my final slide ;)



Photo CC by Shanissinha_

For those of you who wants to see newer vid, looks like this one is in the ranking now :)





Disclaimer- This blog is a personal blog of Fumi Yamazaki. What I write here reflects my personal opinion, and has nothing to do with my employer.

Hatsune Miku - Update

I've been writing a lot about Hatsune Miku, Vocaloid and NicoNicoDouga on this and my other blogs. I thought it might be good timing to do a recap.

Hatsune-Miku is a DTM (Desktop Music) software created by a company called Crypton Future Media(ja). It was released in 2007,and was the best selling DTM software then.(DTM software that sells 1,000 copies are supposed to be hit- Hatsune-Miku sold 30,000.) Its price is 15,000JPY.

Hatsune-Miku and the Vocaloid series (#1 was Hatsune Miku, #2 was Kagamine Rin & Len, #3 was Megurine Luca) created a completely new phenomena in Japan 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 opened up a possibility of "consumer generated music" market in Japan. Already 3 years have passed since its release, and the energy of the creators has not faded.

I wrote a blog post about the decline in the music industry in Japan here. One of the exceptions was Vocaloid.

"EXIT TUNES PRESENTS Vocalogenesis" (a music album created with Vocaloid software)was #1 for 5 days in a row on Oricon album daily ranking, and was #1 for the weekly sales ranking for the week of 2010/5/18～22.



This is the weekly ranking of a Karaoke company -JOYSOUND as of 2010/5/28.

Top 10 songs are:
1・3　　　　　　　　 anime
2・4・6・7・8・10　　 Vocaloid
5・9　　　　　　　　　 Commercial music

Let's take a look at top 20:
14・16・17・19　　　anime
11・15・18　　　　 　Vocaloid
12・13・20　　　　　Commercial music

Vocaloid series 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. Some even created a free software to create 3DCG (MikuMikuDance).

A video clip explaining how to use MikuMikuDance:



An example of awesome video using MMD by WakamuraP




The reason why this happened owes largely on 1) the strategy of Crypton Future Media to use a cute character image as well as to use the voice of a famous anime voice actor (rather than just creating a DTM software), 2) Crypton's policy to open up the character (Miku) for the amateur creators to make parodies. You can't imagine Disney allowing people to create parodies of Mickey Mouse, Nintendo allowing people to create parodies of Pikachu, but that's what Crypton did. And they even created a website "Piapro" (ja) where people can upload their parodies. And the CEO of Crypton (Mr. Hiroyuki Ito) LOVES those derivative works.

-screenshot of Piapro website-

People talk about remix culture and parodies and mashups all around the world these days. Like adding this music and that or that anime and the other one, right? "Remix culture" we're talking about with Hatsune Miku is totally different. It's like a universe. The following chart is just a part of it- how one music video (a dot in the center which is this video "Mikku Miku Ni Shite Ageru") got remixed to numerous videos. And as you can imagine, this is just one exampe but there's lots of popular Miku songs like this so there's many more universes :)

Data source: Network Analysis of Massively Collaborative Creation of Multimedia Contents

Also, the great thing about this remix culture is that people provides their creatives with love, and people remixes them with love and respect for the creator, and they are creating positive cycles around creativity. The fact that the character is open for remix, most music created using Miku is open (and generally creators loves it when their music is remixed, sung, played with musical instruments, made into anime or other creatives- because it increases their views too.), and further remixes are generally welcomed. You don't have to worry about copyright infringement even though you are remixing a high quality content- that's a big benefit for creators!

Asahi Newspaper has been creating a bunch of videos to introduce Hatsune Miku to their audience.

This one covers overall aspects of Hatsune Miku.

"Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, the worlds virtual diva" (Japanese but has English subtitles)



This video covers one of the AWESOME video creators "Tripshots" who creates Hatsune Miku videos.
【Hatsune Miku】video creator・Tripshots～「Nebula」 (Japanese but has English subtitles)

If you're interested in watching more of Hatsune Miku videos, here's some more :)