Hatsune Miku

• 1. Introduction

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  Hatsune Miku is a sixteen-year-old with long turquoise twintails, and she is also a piece of singing software. Crypton Future Media sells her as the mascot of a voicebank. A musician types in lyrics and a melody, and hears her voice sing them back. By 2011, it was reported that songs written under her name numbered 100,000. That is a staggering output for a performer who has no body. Who supplied her voice, and who drew her face? Why did strangers on the internet do the work of building her fame? And how did a character born inside a music program end up on stages, in space, and at a wedding?

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• 2. A Voice and a Face

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  Saki Fujita, a Japanese voice actress, sat for the recordings that became Miku's voice. Each sample held a single Japanese sound, recorded under strict control of pitch and tone. Software strings those sounds together to form words and whole phrases.

  Crypton had already handled the release of two earlier Yamaha vocals, Meiko and Kaito. With Miku, the company concluded that a lovely voice would not be enough on its own. The voice also needed an image. The job of designing one went to Kei Garō, a manga artist known for illustration work with doujin creators.

  Kei received almost no instruction. He was told to build the color scheme around the turquoise associated with Yamaha synthesizers, and to make her an android. He took the hardware theme further. A computer panel on her left sleeve, like other details of her outfit, echoes Yamaha's instruments.

  Her name carries a hidden program. It joins Japanese words that together mean the first sound of the future. Her code name, CV01, makes the same point. She opened Crypton's Character Vocal Series, ahead of Kagamine Rin and Len, code-named CV02, and Megurine Luka, CV03. Official artwork shows the number 01 on her left shoulder.

  Crypton pitched her to buyers with one line of story, calling her "an android diva in the near-future world where songs are lost." That world, as it turned out, would be filled by her listeners.

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• 3. The Fan Factory

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  Nico Nico Douga, a Japanese video site similar to YouTube, became the first place where Miku's songs found an audience. Soon after her release, users began posting videos built around her voicebank. The site grew into a workshop. A song by one user would inspire illustrations, 2D and 3D animations, and remixes from others. Some creators even posted unfinished work to ask for ideas.

  One clip taught Crypton what the software could do for multimedia creators. It showed Hachune Miku, a chibi version of the character, singing "Ievan Polkka" and dancing while twirling a spring onion. The video paid homage to the original Loituma Girl clip. Because the Japanese variety of onion resembles a leek, Miku has been associated with both vegetables ever since.

  An independent programmer then built MikuMikuDance, an unofficial freeware tool for 3D animation. It set off a boom in fan-made animations. Those animations in turn promoted the songs themselves.

  The volume grew quickly. By August 2010, more than 22,000 original songs existed under her name. One of them escaped the community entirely. The Nyan Cat meme used an Utau cover of "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!", a song by Daniwell-P whose original version featured Miku.

  The wider music industry took notice on the 31st of May 2010. A compilation called Exit Tunes Presents Vocalogenesis feat. Hatsune Miku topped the weekly Oricon album chart in Japan. It was the first Vocaloid album to do so.

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• 4. Software Generations

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  The 31st of August 2007 is the day Hatsune Miku first went on sale. She was the third Vocaloid library sold commercially. Her voice has been rebuilt many times since, each time around a new engine.

  On the 30th of April 2010, Crypton released Hatsune Miku Append, an add-on offering six timbres. They were Soft, Sweet, Dark, Vivid, Solid and Light. It required the original program, and no Vocaloid had received a release of this kind before. A seventh Append, a falsetto voice, was recorded but never sold alone. The developers saw little use for it. An English voice built for the second Vocaloid engine was also dropped, because its quality was low.

  English had been promised in 2010. The announcement finally arrived in 2013, to celebrate the official Facebook page reaching 39,390 likes. The move to Vocaloid 3 had caused delays, and so had Crypton's limited familiarity with English pronunciation. The English library went on sale on the 31st of August 2013. The Japanese Vocaloid 3 library followed on the 26th of September.

  The fourth engine brought Hatsune Miku V4X and a system called EVEC, built from recorded vowels with two tones, Power and Soft. Earlier phoneme errors were fixed. The English version appeared on the 30th of August 2016. Pocket Miku, a device that carried her voice, had already been released on the 3rd of April 2014.

  A Mandarin Chinese voicebank arrived in September 2017. That made her the first Vocaloid product with three official languages. Then, in 2019, Wataru Sasaki of Crypton announced that her voices would leave Yamaha's engine and skip Vocaloid 5. He promised that their identity would stay the same.

  On the 24th of December 2019, Sasaki announced Hatsune Miku NT. A prototype of the new editor appeared on the 4th of June 2020. The full release followed on the 27th of November 2020. A second version, NT V2, went into early access on the 23rd of October 2024 and launched on the 18th of March 2025.

  Hatsune Miku V6 came out on the 14th of April 2026 after long delays. It includes two voicebanks, Original and Soft. Both sing in Japanese, English and Chinese.

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• 5. Selling a Character

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  On the 12th of September 2007, Amazon.co.jp reported Miku sales of 57,500,000 yen, which made her the best-selling software of that moment. Later figures were more modest. She reportedly reached 40,000 units by July 2008, an average of 300 a week, and 60,000 by January 2011.

  Crypton aimed her first at professional musicians. What followed was driven by her popularity rather than any initial plan. Other Character Vocals joined the line, yet her name carried most of the company's marketing. Products for its Vocaloid line often show only her. In March 2012, the Nomura Research Institute estimated that sales of Miku-branded goods had reached a vast total since 2007.

  Racing was one outlet. In 2008, Good Smile Racing began licensing Miku and related Crypton characters. The team Studie ran a BMW Z4 E86 painted in her official art in the 2008 and 2009 seasons. Three "MikuMiku Gals," Rin Miyama, Riona Osaki and Hina Saito, worked the 2008 pit stops as Racing Queens. For 2009, Hiroko Nagano, Atsuko and Ayami took over. Their outfits drew on all three of the female Character Vocals.

  Winter was another. Since 2010, Crypton has sponsored the Sapporo winter festivals, where Miku appears in a derivative design called Snow Miku. The look changes each year, and figurines follow. A contest picked the 2012 winner, "Fluffy Coat Snow Miku." The 2013 design was "Strawberry Daifuku Shiromuku Miku."

  In 2014, the contest winner dera_fury drew a magical girl design called "Nekosumi." It came with a pet named Rabbit Yukine, based on a mountain hare. In 2015, Nardack illustrated "Snow Bell Snow Miku."

  In 2011, Crypton also set out to sell Miku to American audiences. It first asked its Japanese fans whether that was acceptable. On the 7th of May, Amazon posted a preview of the Supercell song "World is Mine." When the single went on sale, it ranked number 7 among the top world singles on iTunes in its first week.

  Not every promotion went smoothly. On the 7th of February 2012, a Snow Miku snow sculpture at the festival collapsed. It struck a woman in her early 60s, who suffered no serious injury. The figure was rebuilt elsewhere with better support.

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• 6. Concerts and Collaborations

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  Saitama Super Arena hosted Miku's first "live" virtual concert on the 22nd of August 2009, during Animelo Summer Live. Her image is a projection from the rear onto a specially coated glass screen. That lets an animated figure appear to stand on stage.

  Her tours spread outward from there. Her first overseas appearance came on the 21st of November 2009 at Anime Festival Asia in Singapore. Her first solo concert, "Miku no Hi Kanshasai 39's Giving Day," opened at Zepp Tokyo in Odaiba on the 9th of March 2010. She reached the United States on the 2nd of July 2011, at the Nokia Theater at L.A. Live during Anime Expo, using the same format. In 2012 she returned to Animelo Summer Live. There she performed "World is Mine" and "Tell Your World." Summer Sonic 2013 followed on the 10th of August.

  Fashion took an interest. A 2012 collaboration among Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs and Miku promoted an opera titled The End, in which Vocaloids replace every human actor. It debuted in December 2012 at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Louis Vuitton and the director Toshiki Okada then brought it to the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris on the 13th and the 15th of November 2013. It had no human singers.

  In March 2014, Miku and the band Bump of Chicken recorded "Ray," uploaded on the 12th of March. The video shows the band playing beside her in real time, with no editing afterward. Crypton achieved this with a big curved screen, motion data, WiFi sensors and movement sensors.

  Western stages came next. Miku opened for Lady Gaga's ArtRave: The Artpop Ball from the 6th of May to the 3rd of June 2014. On the 8th of October 2014, she performed "Sharing the World" on the Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. The 2016 Hatsune Miku Expo tour had Anamanaguchi as its opening act. The band recorded a single called "Miku" to mark it.

  Musicians also borrowed her voice for their own records. Pharrell Williams remixed Livetune's "Last Night, Goodnight" with her. Sophie produced "B Who I Want 2 B" for Namie Amuro's album Genic. Big Boi sampled the Aura Qualic song "DATA 2.0" for his 2017 single "Kill Jill" and put her in the video. Slushii released "Through the Night" with her on the 11th of May 2018. Ashnikko's "Daisy 2.0" arrived on the 11th of December 2020, and Set It Off used her in "Why Do I" in 2022.

  In January 2020, Coachella announced her for its Indio, California lineup, but the festival was cancelled because of COVID-19. In January 2024 she was announced again.

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• 7. Beyond the Screen

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  In September 2009, three figurines of Hachune Miku rode a rocket up from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. It never reached outer space. A bigger project followed.

  In late November 2009, the fan Sumio Morioka, who goes online as the producer chodenzi-P, started a petition. He wanted an aluminum plate of Miku, 8 cm by 12 cm, to ride on the Venus explorer Akatsuki as a balancing weight. Dr. Seiichi Sakamoto of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency backed it.

  The petition passed the required 10,000 signatures on the 22nd of December 2009. Delays in the spacecraft schedule pushed the deadline from the 20th of December to the 6th of January 2010. By then more than 14,000 people had signed. Akatsuki launched on the 21st of May 2010 at 06:58:22 Japan time. It carried three plates showing Miku and Hachune in monochrome images, made from tiny letters of the petition messages.

  Her voice also counted down a launch. The third flight of the MOMO sounding rocket, from Interstellar Technologies, used it. Back on Earth, the 59th UK issue of Clash magazine put her on its cover. A real-life photo model stood in for her, with a full feature inside.

  Some connections were accidental. The flag of the city of Chiba happens to echo her silhouette. On the 31st of August 2017, her tenth anniversary, the city government website briefly changed its logo to resemble her.

  Geoffrey Cain of GlobalPost offered one explanation for her reception. He pointed to a Japanese habit of giving souls to inanimate objects, rooted in Shintoism or animism. He also pointed to karakuri ningyo, the old tradition of automated wooden puppets. In his view, people there are readier to treat a virtual character as human. Her name has even become chat slang for "thank you," through a number pun built on Japanese wordplay.

  The most striking case came in November 2018. Akihiko Kondo, a Japanese school administrator, had already unofficially married Miku. He then held a formal wedding with the character, which drew media attention. Crypton told Fox News it had no involvement. The company said: "We see this as one individual's way of expressing his appreciation for Hatsune Miku, and we respect that."

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• 8. Guest Star Everywhere

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  Maker Hikōshiki Hatsune Mix is a manga written by Kei Garō, the artist who first drew her. It has no single storyline and is treated as unofficial. Its episodes range from giant-sized battles to home life. She also turns up as a recurring character in the anime Shinkansen Henkei Robo Shinkalion the Animation. In 2022 she appeared in Dropkick on My Devil! X, where Saki Fujita voiced her directly instead of the Vocaloid software.

  Games have been a natural home. Sega's Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA rhythm series, made under license, has sold 6 million copies. Project Mirai on the Nintendo 3DS based her look on the Nendoroid figures. The mobile rhythm game Project Sekai: Colorful Stage! places her beside original human characters. Many of its songs are covers of Vocaloid originals. Her outfit also appears in the American MMO TinierMe, in Phantasy Star Online 2 as a costume, and in Brave Frontier.

  On the 23rd of July 2015, she was announced as downloadable content for Persona 4: Dancing All Night. In 2020 she arrived in Space Channel 5 VR as Space Channel 39. Players can dance with her or battle her. In 2024, two Colorful Stage songs became unlockable in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.

  A Hatsune Miku pack for Crypt of the Necrodancer added an eighth soundtrack. It includes two songs made exclusively for the game. Magic The Gathering also announced six Miku cards.

  Season 7 of Fortnite Festival made her its featured artist, with two outfits, jam tracks, instruments and emotes. Rocket League gave her vehicle cosmetics. In Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds she is a playable character. Five Sonic-themed Vocaloid tracks were produced for it under the name Project ONSOKU.

  Products followed too. In 2014, Korg introduced Miku Stomp, a guitar effects unit that imitates her voice. In August 2017, for her tenth anniversary, Ricoh released a limited-edition Ricoh Theta 360-degree camera. Its apps let users place her in 55 poses inside photos. The Just Dance series featured dancers dressed like her. "Ievan Polkka" appeared in Just Dance 2016, and "Love Ward" by OSTER project in Just Dance 2018.

  Another crossover, announced in September 2023, pairs Pokémon with Miku. It features 18 illustrations and 18 songs with music videos.

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