Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku, is preparing to perform to a sold-out crowd in Brisbane on Monday night — but there’s a big catch.
The popular singer, who has played to crowds across the world, including the Coachella music festival and a 17-city tour through North America, and who is now embarking on the Australian and New Zealand leg of her tour, does not actually exist.
The virtual vocaloid singer is the mascot for and was built using vocal samples with voice synthesizer software developed by Crypton Future Media in the early 2000s.
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Despite her lack of any real-world presence, she has still managed to collaborate with singer Pharrell Williams, opened for Lady Gaga’s world tour, and even appeared on the David Letterman show.
The voice synthesizer software used to create Miku was modelled on Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita and was sold to the public to allow “anyone to make their computer sing by entering lyrics and melodies”, which are then sung by Miku.
Her “live” performances are of songs chosen from those created using the software.
“As a massive number of users created music using the software and posted their works on the Internet, Hatsune Miku quickly evolved into a cultural phenomenon,” the virtual pop star’s website said.
“Since then, Hatsune Miku has gained much attention as a character, involved in many fields such as merchandising and live performance as a virtual singer—now her popularity has spread across the globe.”
Miku is accompanied by four human musicians and appears as a hologram in a transparent screen centre-stage, with the Guardian writing that Miku “represents a potential future for music creation and fandom, and internet culture’s blurring of the lines between the two”.
Miku, designed to resemble a 16-year-old anime character, has a pop-cultural influence that has reached into video games, song and art collaborations with Pokémon, and even Miku-themed Magic: The Gathering cards.
Miku’s Australian tour begins tonight at the Brisbane’s Convention and Exhibition Centre, before heading to Sydney, Melbourne and wrapping up at RAC Arena in Perth on November 26.
The virtual future
Miku is not the first, or last, pop star to have a hit despite not having a real-world presence.
As far back as 1969, fictional American rock band, The Archies, from the cartoon TV series The Archie Show, topped the charts with their song Sugar, Sugar.
British band the Gorillaz, created in 1998 by British musician Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, consists of four fictional band members and landed on the music scene as a highly successful virtual band via elaborate video clips and chart-topping albums.
However in both those instances, real musicians provided the voice and music.
In 2012 a hologram of dead rapper Tupac Shakur performed during a live set at Coachella alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre to a stunned audience.
Swedish band ABBA also famously held a virtual concert, depicting the group as they appeared in the 70s, in a purpose built stadium in London, also virtually performing to a sold-out crowd at Eurovision in 2024.
But the new wave of virtual stars is entirely artificially created and attracting huge fanbases.
In 2016, Kizuna AI became one of the most successful virtual YouTubers of all time, with more than 4 million subscribers.
The future of the virtual celebrity does not appear to be slowing down, as virtual influencers take off online, such as Miquela Sousa also known as Lilmiquela, whose Instagram bio reads “21-year-old Robot living in LA”.
Lilmiquela has gained 2.5million of follows on their Instagram account and has been featured in product endorsements for streetwear as well as luxury brands such as Calvin Klein and Prada.