Why the Popularity of VOCALOID has Declined

A 21 minute-long video by the utaite Kouhey, translated and summarized. Disclaimer: This is not representative of my opinions.

Is the scene really declining?

A while ago, it was natural for VOCALOID songs to rank high in the total rankings, but now, there’s often times where there’s not a single new one. The numbers have clearly fallen.

At the halfway point of 2015, only 14 songs have reached over 200k views. Up until 2-3 years ago, they were reaching 1 million views one after the other.

This decline was inevitable, brought about by the peculiarity of the birth and development of VOCALOID culture, along with many other causes. 

So, isn’t it just something that’s “over” now, past its “boom”? It happens all the time in the music industry. Like the band boom of the 1980s, the influx of Korean culture, the idol age…

Not really. Those are just examples of people moving genres within the music industry to more popular ones. It’s not like the number of people listening to music has gone down.

The VOCALOID boom just suddenly ended on its own, without people moving to another genre. So, why is that?

Let’s define the meaning of VOCALOID - what is it?

“A new music genre?” Miku can sing anything, from rock to enka.

“A new music tool?” That’s what Crypton created VOCALOID to be. What I’m asking is what VOCALOID is on Niconico Douga.

“One of the big three?” Yes. In other words, it’s a popular category comparable to Idolm@ster or Touhou. A fixed part of Niconico.

Hatsune Miku, created not just as a vocal synthesizer but also as a cute character, became the new toy for otaku wasting their talents, leading VOCALOID to become a popular category. 

Back then, everyone had Miku sing, dance, act, talk, wear clothes, made songs for her, drew illustrations of her… They weren’t just people writing songs, these genres of people were VOCALOID-Ps producing the character called Hatsune Miku. The -P title from Idolm@ster was the origin of the “producer” title.

People produced Miku, her popularity rose, others made more Miku songs, and more people wanted to see. Essentially, VOCALOID became a category able to stand alongside iM@S and Touhou because of this idol named Hatsune Miku.

At a glance, you’d think “VOCALOID category = music”, but it’s actually more along the lines of Kancolle, Touken Ranbu, etc. The category is a collection of popular works that users made themselves.

Look at the scene now - what’s the difference? There hasn’t been much Miku lately? More IA and GUMI? But iM@S and Touhou don’t become less popular when they add more characters. (With the exception of idol games adding hot male characters while decreasing the number of characters you can use *cough* 9.18 iM@S incident…)

Let’s find some examples. What kind of VOCALOID songs have been popular lately? Do they have some unique qualities to them, aside from tuning, etc.?

Haven’t there been a lot of project songs? Kagerou Project would be the prime example, but it feels like there’s been continuations, series, and all that stuff lately.

Instead of having to earn views on each individual song, you can make it into a series - people will become fans of the series itself, your views will stabilize, multiply, and you can then start looking at expanding to other forms of media. There’s been quite a few novelizations, manga adaptations, even anime and movie adaptations.

And what have producers been doing lately to increase their views? Uploading simultaneously with an utaite and making VOCALOID versions of songs they wrote for the utaite’s CD.

…

Well, let’s get back to the main topic!

Pretend VOCALOID is an anime featuring Hatsune Miku as the main character, where users create the plot.

Basically Love Live, where we have complete control over the production of our idols. VOCALOID songs are character songs sung by anime characters. Don’t you want to buy the song if you’re a fan of the anime? Don’t you want to see Maki-chan in a new outfit each time a new PV is released? If the characters played parts in fantasy, historical, love, or slightly-sexy AUs, you’d want to see, wouldn’t you? (Story of Evil, Alice in Musicland, World is Mine, Kurumi Ponchi…)

In that vein, the first reason for the decline of VOCALOID is…

Reason one: People have stopped making “VOCALOID original” songs.

What? Aren’t they still being uploaded in large volumes right now?

Those aren’t “VOCALOID originals”, those are “songs uploaded to the VOCALOID category”. We mentioned that project/series VOCALOID songs have been popular lately, right? There’ve been anime adaptations, anime openings, things like that. 

“So, which VOCALOID is singing?” There’s a lot of Miku, IA, GUMI? It’s not really clear…

“What outfits are they singing in?” Like I said, it’s a series, so the characters in the PV are all from the series…

“What outfits are Miku and the rest singing in?” No, the characters in the PV are all from the series, so Miku doesn’t appear…

“How is Miku drawn in that video?” Listen, I said that Miku doesn’t appear…

“How about the MMDs of the song? Cosplay? Fanfiction?” There all original characters…

“Those songs have taken control of the VOCALOID category?”

“Aren’t Vocalo-Ps producers that write VOCALOID original songs?”

In other words, although the producer’s intent was to create a VOCALOID song, these popular series songs that have nothing to do with the VOCALOIDs singing have taken over the VOCALOID category. But if the song uses VOCALOID, then isn’t it related, even if the characters don’t appear at the forefront?

Remember why VOCALOID became such a popular category in the first place.

People watched because it was a VOCALOID song. Because the character “Hatsune Miku” was singing. Putting it in other terms, people watched because it was iM@s. Because the character “Amami Haruka” was singing.

Yet with the popular songs lately, Miku doesn’t appear in the PV even when she’s singing, derivative artworks, MMDs, cosplays, all of them are unrelated to the VOCALOIDs themselves.

The song isn’t contributing to VOCALOID=You aren’t a Vocalo-P=It’s not a VOCALOID original song.

I’m not denying the music or talent of the Vocalo-Ps. I’m just saying that these people aren’t “producing VOCALOID”. There’s nothing wrong with using VOCALOIDs to sing your work, rather than writing songs for the sake of VOCALOID.

Once the idol-like quality of VOCALOID characters (which was crucial to the development of VOCALOID) was lost, they started to become no more than “machines you have sing”. The “I’ll listen because it’s VOCALOID” type of thinking disappeared. VOCALOIDs have become “instruments” like pianos or guitars.

An original song you made with a guitar doesn’t go in the “guitar” category, does it? It’d probably go to the “Niconico Indies”, which is where VOCALOID may end up.

Isn’t that kind of a weak reason for the big VOCALOID crash?

VOCALOID’s loss of its idol-like quality was only one reason. There’s many others.

Reason two: The dam broke.

The music industry has always worked like a dam. Only those who pass through the filters of luck, talent, good looks, connections, and money can enter this world. Making your major debut isn’t enough to be known, either - countless bands have died out with no one ever knowing of them. In the past, there weren’t any methods of spreading your name outside of lives, such as local FM radio, being featured or advertised in music magazines, or TV.

But wasn’t that a long time ago? Thanks to the spread of the internet, you can just advertise yourself. 

Who wants to spend their time listening to the music of some guy they don’t know whose name they’ve never heard? Try looking at the videos of utaites at the very bottom: 10 views, 3 comments, 1 mylist, and each comment aside from “shit” is their own.

Those with no luck, no money, no members, people that’re too old, don’t appeal to a wide audience - these talented people who couldn’t break into the music world due to any of these reasons created a “dam”. Thanks to Miku, these people could break out - isn’t that a good thing?

Once the dam broke, it all went into tthe VOCALOID Hatsune Miku. The talented Vocalo-Ps all made their songs at once and all became famous at once. This was a two-edged sword.

The pattern for anyone creating music usually goes like this:
Start at the bottom→Work at it→Desires satisfied (money, popularity)→Activity calms down, enter public conscience→Lose popularity

Booms normally come and go all at once, but VOCALOID is a different case. There’s no company or label, you take part according to your own will. When the dam is released, nothing is left - there’s nothing to act as a force holding the dam in place.

The first wave was “the otaku producing Hatsune Miku”. The Vocalo-Ps who produce Hatsune Miku, and the fans who love Hatsune Miku. Left because people stopped making VOCALOID original songs, and also because they felt it was becoming too commercialized. This wave was completely eliminated. They either returned to anime, or flowed into voiceloid, yukkuri, or let’s plays. They didn’t move to a different music genre, they switched categories.

The second wave was “the music industry using Hatsune Miku”. The people who came in the second wave are middle/high-school fans who love the Vocalo-Ps or the series, not Hatsune Miku. When the producers leave or the series ends, they don’t look through other songs or the category ranking because they’re not Miku fans. So they all got tired and left once the producers all left at once.

And then no one’s left.

Isn’t there something we can do about this?!

*anime preview voice* Next time on- *screen cuts out*

Of course, there’s a different picture to be painted across the world, outside of the main Japanese community. IA at Anime Expo was huge, and people like Crusher-P have caused Japanese users to start taking notice of overseas/YouTube producers. This argument may be not applicable to you at all, depending on what parts of the fandom you’ve interacted with. My friend @yuzukimasu tweeted about some of the issues with marketing and other stuff over here in the west, and I’m sure there’s lots more to be said. If you yourself feel strongly about this topic, I definitely encourage you to contribute to the discussion.

Unfortunately, I’m out - as you can tell from this blog, I quickly switched over to Love Live and later Momoiro Clover Z. Maybe I’ll be picked up by a third VOCALOID wave. Maybe not. As someone formerly a main translator for this community, though, I hope that this translationsummary has provided some explanations.