Late summer 2007. Through a blog entry, Crypton Future Media releases a voice pack titled ‘Hatsune Miku’ for VOCALOID2, a music software for producing hits. “We wanted to transmit a virtual voice especially pretty […] to invite you to create songs », summarized the company’s text.
What started out as a simple update to a music show, a package of more intoned voices by a Japanese woman, soon shot to fame. That same year, Miku (via Crypton) was nominated for several awards, most notably, of production.
From that moment on, Hatsune Miku “nation”.
16 years “perpetual”
Two years after her first song, in 2009, Hatsune Miku acquired the first tints of her personality. The reason? Miku’s voice had become a small mass phenomenon in Nico Nico Douga (the Japanese equivalent to YouTube) and the increase in sales.
“In Japan it was a success for a virtual instrument to sell 1,000 units a year. Hatsune Miku sells 1,000 bookstores a week», collects a local media in 2008.
To help promote the hitherto unknown show, Crypton hired manga artist Kei Garo to create a fictional character to illustrate their show. The result was a 16-year-old girl (permanent age, never grows) with a height of 1.58 centimeters and a weight of 42 kilograms.
Technically, and according to the lore of the company itself, Miku she is an android and so his age is frozen in time.
“The sound of the future”
It was in 2010, three years after its creation, that Hatsune Miku went down in music history. Although she had already had a small appearance as an “opener”, on March 9 of that year the virtual singer starred in her first show… through a hologram.
The event was actually part of the promotional campaign for Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA, a video game released for PSP that year, but ended up being a phenomenon in its own right. From that moment the ban was opened and Miku began to appear on stages throughout Japan and the world.
Although she had a brief appearance during an event in Singapore in 2009, in 2014 the holographic singer gave a concert at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, being his first solo performance outside of Japan. Shortly after, in 2016, she would return to the North American country to make a six-stop tour throughout the region.
How could it be otherwise, Hatsune Miku also has been in Spain. His first appearance dates back to 2018, when he made a small cameo in ‘The End’ (a futuristic opera led by Keiichiro Shibuya).
In January 2020, he gave his first solo concert in the country: 3,000 people gathered at the Palau de Sant Jordi to attend Hatsune Miku’s (solo) concert. This put the point and end of their European tour.
THANK YOU BARCELONA!!!!!
Thus concludes #MIKUEXPO2020 EUROPE tour!!!!!!
✨????????????????????????????????????????✨
Thank you Barcelona for coming through and making this an unforgettable night!!! ???????? pic.twitter.com/SlxoZaJCOO— Hatsune Miku (@cfm_miku_en) January 28, 2020
Hatsune Miku, in her 15 years “of life”, has become the most successful virtual singer on the planet. In addition to the concerts already mentioned, she has been the opening act for Lady Gaga and was one of the headliners of Coachella 2020 with Lana del Rey, Travis Scott and more artists (although it was canceled due to the pandemic).