We're definitely in some sort of new golden age of vocaloid yes

>>12960
Became a fan around 2012 or 2013 & definetely, especially on the Western side
I used to avoid English Vocaloid songs near entirely but now there’s multiple I adore. I always liked the few Latin American Vocaloid songs I know though (despite not speaking any of the languages)

I also became a Vocaloid fan in 2013, but I was almost always partial to the Western side. I think we're entering a golden era... Somewhat. The average new fan doesn't have the same behaviors of old fans, and they will often purposefully avoid content that uses voicebanks they're unfamiliar with, and said knowledge is often very limited. On the flipside, certain wholoids are in a sort of golden era. I've been seeing more and more Miki lately and slightly more Gakupo than usual. While it's too early to tell, I do think some casual listeners are starting to value voicebank variety again.

>>12960
Some things have changed, some things feel the same.
To me the biggest difference is how decentralized the fandom feels now. When the main mode of song delivery was NicoNico, everyone could just go to the rankings and see who the top 3 producers were that day, so there were more “household name” songs and producers. On the Western side, you had hardsubbers who would curate the top hits for you. The effect was that most people in the fandom regardless of power level checked the same pages and were on the same page. That’s why the pre-2014 age generated so many popular names. In contrast, modern content discovery is really dependent on what YouTube decides to send you personally (I’m aware of YouTube aggregators, but most people aren’t). It feels very decentralized, and the songs that get popular are inclined towards the algorithm. There are still smash hits, actually they might be bigger than anything we’ve had before, but it’s not like the 2012 era where you could talk to someone with the reasonable expectation they would know most of the big recent artists’ discographies.
The new boom also introduced a LOT of variety, it’s like a Cambrian explosion with all the new artists. It’s totally a golden age, very 2012. Vocaloid has been legitimized in a lot of people’s eyes with new realistic vocals. It’s both a meme and not a meme. As a fan I find it really hard to keep up which I’ve posted about before. That’s the part that makes me feel like an old fogey even more than, like, Proseka does, but who knows maybe I feel out of touch since I stopped playing? Anyway…

>>12964
The memetic popularity of Miku/Teto, the Pearto stuff, etc. all feels very familiar. The character appeal side of Vocaloid fell off a little (starting in 2012 actually) but it’s back in full force. I do believe it’s one of the pillars of the Vocaloid scene so I don’t mind it at all when the kids go nuts over it. I find it kind of refreshing that the Vocaloids are in their own MVs again, and fandom-based character traits like Teto as a burnt out adult are bubbling up despite the decentralization of the fandom. That part feels the same as 2008 to me and makes me feel excited to see what these youngins have in store over the long term.
As for better or worse, it’s a matter of opinion. Sometimes it feels weird to be surrounded by so many new fans. I think eventually someone will think of me as some kind of flavor of the month fan which will feel even weirder. But all you can do is just keep truckin and drawing and listening to music and ride the wave, man.

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It's hard to deny that we're in the golden era of the western Vocaloid community. The 2010s were a weird time where so few producers were active that if you didn't like the same 2-3 genres, you'd probably have a hard time looking for stuff in English. Nowadays there's so many new and varied originals that it feels about equal to the 2008-2009 era in Japan.

Japanese producers have talked about how Vocaloid music is "legit" in Japan now, as in, it's seen as a kind of alt-pop instead of some weird anime gamer music. That's a good thing in most ways, but it's also changed the music scene quite a bit. Instead of just appealing to Vocaloid fans and otaku, producers have to be thinking about alt teens, hipsters, or even totally normal radio music. The decentralization on YT has also hit them pretty badly - small producers do even worse than they used to, and much less content is guaranteed to make it to the west. Still, a lot of the songs coming out are phenomenal and would've blown people's minds back then.

Aside from the music, the biggest difference I've noticed is that it's just a lot more comfy to be a Vocaloid fan now. People outside the hobby are more likely to know what a Miku is and won't call you gay for liking Chinese cartoons, which is pretty cool in my book.

I'm personally glad that now a lot of the big producers can be found on youtube now

>>12968
>The decentralization on YT has also hit them pretty badly - small producers do even worse than they used to, and much less content is guaranteed to make it to the west.
This doesn't match my experience. YouTube today is far more likely to surface smaller uploaders as recommendations than it was in the past, nor are casual fans today dependent almost entirely on YouTube reprints of Nico uploads. If you approach Vocaloid casually or as a light enthusiast, the vast majority of the audience, you're far more likely to encounter smaller producers today than you would have in the past.

On Nico there used to be an expression that every upload tagged with ボカロ got viewed by at least 50 people that followed the tag religiously. More recently it's been tempered tongue-in-cheek that at most 25 people view every upload, which probably couples with Nico being a dying platform, but mainly that there are far more uploads to wade through. The acceleration of content everywhere, including Vocaloid, really means there is less of a window for anything to receive attention or maintain it with any longevity. Algorithmic serendipity feels like it has given smaller producers a lot of more opportunity to break out that may have otherwise been dependent on a handful of enthusiasts before.

>>12998
Producer here. My recent stuff has been getting lots of views despite being a literal nobody. So I can confirm that the Youtube algo pushes lesser known songs to regular listeners.

>>12968
>>12998
I feel like the best time to be a small producer on YouTube was 2016-2018, it felt like a lot of new producers both in Japan and overseas got a sudden boom in popularity (Hirose Aru, for example) or ones who had a cult following suddenly started getting an audience staggeringly fast (GHOST) leading to more songs based on theirs, sort of like a proto-Mesmerizer effect

Youtube will absolutely recommend even sub 1k view videos if it decides you are interested in the topic, it feels like most new music i get recommended these days is <10k views, usually much less. There are so many small producers these days though it is absolutely impossible to watch everything.

>>12968
>Japanese producers have talked about how Vocaloid music is "legit" in Japan now, as in, it's seen as a kind of alt-pop instead of some weird anime gamer music.

The perception of Vocaloid as a genre is still deeply tied with otaku culture no? I usually see Vocaloid coupled with anison or doujin music. Sure, there's always a lot of different genres within the scene ever since the late 2000s, but I doubt it's going to be something that's detached from otaku culture.

>>13005
I wonder if things like IOSYS are seen the same way. Especially with those recent McDonald's collaborations.

Feels like western vocaloid is doing better than ever

>>12998
The YouTube algorithm is very beneficial *if* your videos can hit it. Looking at the daily vocaran, it's actually shocking how much the engagement for small Japanese producers has dropped off since the early 2010s. A lot of perfectly fine songs are getting almost no views or comments just because they don't fit in the YT algorithm. Now it's like trying to launch any other YT career, basically.

I have an account that I mostly use for western P stuff, and there's a pretty healthy stream of western P recs. I'd guess the western scene is still close enough to that "everyone knows everyone" era that it's not hard to get picked up organically. But when it comes to non-western recs... unironically the main advice I see is "go on VocaDB and listen to a bunch of stuff until your algorithm works". The old NND/YT divide seems to be holding up, in a way.

>>13005
It's definitely still there and will probably stay that way. There's just a significant enough crossover audience coming from Ado and Kenshi Yonezu that you can see more producers trying to catch that, making songs with both otaku and non-otaku in mind. r-906 is a good example.

>>13005
The perception of what "otaku culture" has itself undergone radical transformation in the past 15-20 years. Whether it is ground in a traditional otaku culture or not doesn't matter too much because otaku culture has been transplanted to oshikatsu both commercially and in the minds of many people that consider themselves otaku or are bathing unknowingly in its cultural output.

That said, if anyone believes Vocaloid is strictly otaku subculture in Japan, they should pay more attention to Joysound karaoke rankings. Vocaloid music is pop music if you are in a young enough age bracket.

>>13008
>Now it's like trying to launch any other YT career, basically.
A lot of Japanese producers really don't approach creation with virality in mind. Not to say they are averse to juicing the stats, but it was a different game when they were trying to run up Nico's weekly Vocaran or mylist numbers. It's almost built into the doujin ethos that you create in your corner and whatever audience you gather is mostly incidental, rather than something to champion and self-promote. I can't really speak to the YouTube numbers myself (I've crunched some data on Nico's before) but YouTube is a global platform with abundance, so I wouldn't be too surprised if the long tail for Japanese producers has gotten longer. Views are depressed on Nico since 2016-2017, but I can definitely say even as Vocaloid's premiere platform the tail is pretty shockingly long there.

Whether things feel “worse” or like a new golden era really depends on when someone got into Vocaloid, and what they think is best for the broader fandom.
Oldhead take, but: the fact that we no longer have to live with the kind of anxiety that used to feel normal—like “the Hatsune Miku boom will be over in a few months, and nobody will care about Vocaloid anymore”—is, to put it mildly, an amazing place to be.
At the same time, people who first discovered Miku as adults probably can’t fully share the perspective of those who grew up in a world where the fandom already existed and commercial releases were simply part of the landscape. It’s honestly hard to picture what “now” feels like from their side.
Still, one thing is clear: for nearly two decades, the scene has kept renewing itself. New creators and new listeners (especially in their teens and twenties) keep showing up, and that steady turnover is a sign of real staying power. In a creator-driven community, that kind of generational change isn’t a problem—it’s part of what keeps it healthy.
Even in the 2010s, I didn’t believe the scene was going to vanish. But the “Vocaloid is declining” / “Miku is over” talk has always cycled back around, and some people leave when it stops feeling like “their” scene. That friction between longtime fans and newcomers hasn’t really disappeared.
On the flip side, people can also come back at any time. I’ve done it myself, and whenever I return, I find new talent and genuinely great work waiting.
Real decline would be when veterans start gatekeeping, newcomers stop coming in, and the whole thing hardens into something closed. That’s not what I see right now. People come and go, and the scene keeps moving forward—so from where I’m standing, I wouldn’t call it worse at all.

>>13016
Hioka coming in with the truth bombs.

Personally while I acknowledge that the community has drastically changed from when I joined to now, on the rare occasion you can still see the old charm poke through. While the community is now predominantly occupied by youth, there’s also still some who still create. I think we are in a period where the music has definitely gotten significantly better, however we are definitely in a more trend focused time in regards to vocaloid. It’s pretty obvious with a lot of Miku Teto duets and the like.

There is another aspect though I definitely didn’t consider more and more until recently and it comes from both my viewing of video essays about nostalgia and how I looked into some rumours from the V3 era a few years back. Nostalgia definitely blinds us and skews our perception a bit. Idk if I ever mentioned it on here but as and example, one of the rumours I had investigated at the time was that V3 was an initial failure despite popular belief and it was through lots of digging that I was able to verify that as well as find some supporting evidence that V5 was (and technically still is)the most successful Vocaloid version to date.

All this to say that there’s both been lots of change over the last 15 years I’ve been a Vocaloid fan both publicly facing and in the background and that to this day, a lot of knowledge that we had thought we once knew or took as fact was really misunderstood, especially by overseas.

Other than all that I can really only say things about the people and community behaviours over the years and that is very much fluctuating. It was bad then it started getting good, then bad, then good, and currently we’re probably the most toxic the community has ever been, though in due time I do think we’ll see positivity again. Heck, I do enjoy 39chan for the reason that many users seem to be level headed and much more open to discussion than other places.

>>13024
>V5 is the most successful
I mean it is an improvement over the previous versions. The criticism comes from the lack of voicebanks and the fact that it stopped the development of projects such Sonika V4 (leading to Zero-G quitting vocal synths in general).

Your fortune: Good news will come to you by mail

>>13026
I also recall some similar criticisms being made about V6 (You can actually even see some of them on this site in the V6 thread). The price, the lack of voicebanks, the engine noise, Shiki Rowen (although this one was mostly within the western community, I've heard good things about Rowen from the Japanese community), etc. People have a more positive opinion on V6 these days though. A lot of people even want their favorite vocaloids from previous generations to be ported to it.

Your fortune: Outlook good

>>13016
Truth.

To be fair I never thought of Vocaloid as a fad, even when it was a small niche. Perhaps you could say that it was one in 2004, when its target audience wasn't otaku but professional producers (One of the first big producers to use Vocaloid was in fact Mike Oldfield, who you might recognize from creating "Tubular Bells" from The Exorcist soundtrack, or "Nuclear" from the Metal Gear Solid 5 soundtrack).
But the release of Hatsune Miku completely changed the direction of vocal synthesizers and created an unique culture formed on creativity and shared love for both the music and characters. So maybe if Miku had never been created chances are that Vocaloid, like its predecessors would have faded into obscurity.

>>13029
Miku was a domino effect

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>>13026
Don't worry anon, she'll return when we least expect her

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>>13030
Come to think about it, it's actually pretty crazy how much of an impact Miku had on VOCALOID itself that by the time she became the main selling point of the software people were demanding that they change the designs of both previous and future voicebanks. One of the biggest complains from Spanish fans when the Bruno and Clara voicebanks were revealed was that the characters didn't look moe and instead looked like GTA loading screen portraits. And that gave us the designs we are now more familiar with.

>>13032
I remember that, lol. They did something similar for the Taiwanese market with those E-Capsule designs. Still not a fan of their Big AL design. Bara Frankenstein is more iconic.

The /rvr/ threads on this site are pretty good, its one of the ways i discover new music

>>13032
An earlier instance of this would also be Sonika. The early design (CGI) was seen as "ugly" and then we got the one design that looks like something out of a MOBA game. That one is good, but it seems like everyone prefers the E-Capsule one.

>>13026
The thing about voicebanks is I’ve seen many people over the years link the amount of voicebanks to the success of the engine when in reality there’s no connection at all. The result of this is there’s many people both new and old who believe V3 was super successful in comparison when in reality many voicebanks didn’t sell well until after 2013 (around when Miku V3 released).

A harsh reality but in truth it was just that the development fees used to be significantly cheaper, and around the time V5 came around, potentially even a little before it, dev fees increased significantly. It’s no wonder why so many companies stopped developing for a period. Of course Yamaha did need to get development interest back since they weren’t making any dev fee money so they set up new programs like FANding for that purpose, but otherwise made plenty of Editor sales.

It’s definitely all linked to money at the end of the day and third parties aren’t always made of it. Doesn’t help the other options also have high fees.

Brings up another matter just pertaining to Miku herself. In the background at least that is. Back during V3, it’s very safe to say that Vocaloid needed Miku as her V3 release was pretty much the unsung savior of the software whereas now Miku needs Vocaloid. Even if her voicebanks still sell fine, after what happened with NT, she definitely didn’t sell as well as her Vocaloid counterparts and eventually CFM would have just been bleeding money had they not started to simultaneously per sue both engines.

>>13070
Wasn't V2 the most successful?

>>13070
>>13071
>many voicebanks didn’t sell well until after 2013
>Vocaloid needed Miku as her V3 release was pretty much the unsung savior of the software
Idk if this checks out given that Yukari and IA became top 10 loids immediately, and Gumi V3 was a launch product as well. The banks that flopped never really rebounded either (unless you count flower being much more successful on V4). Surely it did well objectively, it's just impossible for anything without Miku to be the #1 bestseller.

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Speaking of V3, the early 2010s really seemed to be the peak of celebrity voicebanks. You'd see a lot of characters voiced by famous singers or designed by famous artists. Nowadays, there's not very much of that.

>>13082
I don't know if it counts but we got a lot of VSingers and Vtubers on V6 as well as Porter Robinson voicing Po-uta.

>>13084
Koto and the new GUMI voicebanks were also designed by Nou who you might know from Kairiki Bear's music videos

>>13084
>>13085
I'm thinking more along the lines of "Mew is Ryuichi Sakamoto's daughter" or "ZOLA was made by the Final Fantasy illustrator". Porter Robinson also counts.

>>13077
V2 was massively successful but not the most successful to date. By the second half of its life, sales were on a severe decline.
>>13078
Piracy was growing sharply. While the Japanese community doesn’t acknowledge it, they were active participants in the piracy scene. Not to mention the rumour of V3 being an initial failure came from a known Vocaloid dev, being Yuki Seto who is still an active developer currently part of Yamaha’s SoundUD. When I went to look at the sales numbers years back, the research I did only verified the statement.

It goes back to that statement I previously made about nostalgia. Many users think it was a much more positive time but there was a real chance that Vocaloid could have ended at 3. Of course we we know, things improved over time.

>>13084
I would say that’s the difference. We went from the average celebrities to Internet Celebrities that grew up with Vocaloid. Porter being a blend of both haha.

In all honesty most people don’t believe me even if I do provide my supporting evidence, so I’ve just kinda given up to a point. I still share my knowledge on the matter when I feel it’s appropriate to offer it, though most users just think I’m making stuff up.

Admittedly it can be very funny when someone pulls up something that changes our previous understandings of a topic much later, but people still stick with the old understanding. Yan he’s development for example recently has been under scrutiny but despite showing the research and lack of evidence supporting the original story, everyone will likely remain inclined to still say the president at the time still spent the money at a brothel not just ‘cause it’s funny, but it was the story we had known for a significant period.

Correcting past errors is a difficult task with how big the community is these days. It takes an understanding from everyone to correct it.

>>13092
What's the story behind Yanhe if the prostitutes thing was a hoax?

>>13092
>Correcting past errors is a difficult task with how big the community is these days. It takes an understanding from everyone to correct it.
i still see a lot of misinfo from ages ago being tossed around in the community so this definitely is true. can't think of any examples off the top of my head though

>>13091
I feel like... for better or worse... one day we'll start having more synths based on western singers.

>>13090
I recall hearing that piracy is taboo in Japan so this is surprising to me.

>>13105
It is, that just means the piracy scene is exclusively anon or in private circles. 2ch has its own version of /t/.

>>13093
I wouldn’t say it was a hoax as much as it was lots of mistranslations and rumours that circulated. The mismanagement of the funds for example was true, but where it was spent, in this case a brothel, was a mistranslation. So what we have is basically the truth surrounded by error.

>>13115
This pretty much. A majority of Japanese pirates tend to put on a front. The reality is many do not care as much as it seems. If they cared I don’t think you’d see so many used copies of Miku V2 on Mercari and Yahoo Auctions.

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>>13016

>>13016
This is off topic but I like that after the interview he's become part of the the site's community and just posts here every once in a while. A lot of the things he has to say are interesting to me because we're hearing it from the perspective of not only one of the most important figures in the Vocaloid community but also someone who's been in it since almost the very beginning.

>>13016
Hioka, if you're still around. Is there something you liked from the old days of Vocaloid that you feel is missing today?.

>>13750
I'm not him but I miss when songs would take off even without a highly detailed music video.

>>13919
I feel the same

>>13750
It might be a little different from saying something is “missing,” but I do feel like the whole voice-synth ecosystem—tech, creators, and fans—has matured and settled into place to some extent.

Back then, everyone was genuinely feeling their way forward, and because nobody could see what was coming, it felt like every possibility was wide open. There’s still plenty to enjoy and be surprised by today, of course—but it doesn’t feel like the same kind of uncharted territory. With all the precedents and hard-earned lessons that came before, the community has built up a lot of shared knowledge.

That stability helped the scene grow, but I do feel a bit nostalgic for that old uncertainty.

Still, I think even if all the “pieces” are already here, there are countless combinations nobody has tried yet. I’d love to experience that kind of pure surprise again.

>>13942
I still think the surprise factor is still there. Today we are used to listening to whatever's popular but every once in a while some producer will make an unexpected hit with an unexpected Vocaloid, like a couple years back Yukopi made a song with Kaai Yuki and it was everywhere.

>>13949
Yeah, that kind of surprise definitely still happens—and you’re right, it can kick off a whole new wave.

What I meant by “surprise,” though, is something a bit more on the technical side.

Back in the Nico Nico days, a mysterious video showed up with “ぼかりす” in the title. It was Hatsune Miku, but at the time it sounded incredibly close to a human singing voice.

Nico Nico:

https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm3128145 [Embed]

YouTube:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=msEN5bbIgbc [Embed]

It was uploaded on April 28, 2008—only about eight months after Miku’s release—and it really made an impact. And at first, nobody even knew what it was.

A few days later, it turned out to be “VocaListener,” developed by AIST in Japan—basically a system that estimates singing parameters from a human performance to help a Vocaloid sing more naturally. Not fully automatic, but it showed the potential very clearly.

These days, as AI has advanced, “human-like” singing isn’t shocking anymore. Still, I’d love to experience that kind of moment again—when something new suddenly expands what’s possible in the creative world.

>>14050
Was unaware of this. Interesting.

>>14050
I actually had heard of VocaListener before. This was before the whole AI boom so people used that to make their tuning sound more realistic. It's cool that it was around for that long and that it was announced this way.

>>14050
I feel the same way about a plugin that came out for SynthV that makes voicebanks scream

>>14050
I've seen people automatically tune a voicebank in SynthV then transfer the tuning to other engines like Vocaloid and UTAU. Admittedly it's not as impressive as manual tuning or the Vocalistener you posted but it's still interesting that it can be done at all.

>>14050
I think i remember using this when i was a kid

I don't think a lot of people will realize this until it's over but we are in a new golden era of vocaloid. In the mid 2010s there was a shared sentiment among producers that vocaloid was dead/dying.

>>15334
This is connected to what I had mentioned earlier about V3 being an initial failure and how nostalgia blinds us a little bit in regards to past information.

It’s kind of funny, we’ve had 2 maybe even 3 times where “vocaloid is dying” or “vocaloid is dead” was a common sentiment but both times I can think of, one time was proven to have had a huge decline while the other was the complete opposite because everyone was at home making new songs during the pandemic lol

It’s just so funny looking and comparing the stats because things for Vocaloid as a whole are much better now than they used to be. Even I used to be nostalgia blind like this.

Hard not to chuckle at my own naivety.

>>15334
For me, as much as I hate the new crowd, I'd rather vocaloid still get used rather than die in obscurity. I will still forever prefer to live in 2012-2014 though. I will acknowledge that we are in a second golden era though.

I've seen some refer to this second gold era as a Renaissance, which makes sense in the grand scheme.

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>>15334
no one remembers that this was the moment that killed vocaloid

>>15350
Context?

>>15351
Mekakucity Actors

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>>15351
>>15352
specifically episode 9 and its terrible cgi
around 2012-2014 there was a huge bubble of song series turning into light novels, manga and anime. people thought this was going to be the future of vocaloid, like it was going to be narou-kei before narou-kei was a thing... then most of them turned out to have questionable quality. this ep was so indefensible that it kinda became a turning point where vocaloid was officially cringe.

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>>15355
Wow, I had no idea they released that on the CD-I

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I'm gonna be honest I know absolutely nothing about Mekakucity Actors or Kagerou Project even to this day. The only thing I know is Ene because I remember seeing her a lot back in the day and I think she's cute. Apparently this series was popular with the Tumblr Danganronpa crowd in the 10's. Never bothered to actually check it out though I was more into Vocaloid songs than full series which is why I also could never get into Evillious Chronicles.

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>>15357
imagine if kagepro succeeded, instead of a million isekai shows we'd have a million danganronpa shows lol

>>15358
>danganronpa
What do they even have in common aside from similar fanbase

>>15360
edgy chuunibyou writing, large colorful cast of characters, tons of main character death, timeline shenatomodachins, gay shipping encouraged
it wouldn't literally be danganronpa but tl;dr similar audience by design

>>15364
lol word filter

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Luv me Ayano, simple as

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>>15346
>>15347
I would consider it a renaissance.
Curiously though, interest appears to have peaked in the 2010s according to Google Trends.

>>15374
Dunno how good of a metric it is, lots of people these days probably just searching "Kasane Teto" or "SynthV" etc. It's less centralized on Vocaloid

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>>15376
makes sense

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>>15355
>>15357
>>15358

all of the kagepro fans i knew in those days were so pretentious. never got into it because no one would tell me what was it about or because "can't explain the plot lmao it's too hard to understand". it's just nasuverse mystic eyes what's so difficult about it.


still preferring it one hundred times more than puroseka, shame the project died

>>15379
>"can't explain the plot lmao it's too hard to understand"
well i mean, as a kagepro fan, they're not wrong
every adaption of it has a different sort of story/timeline/whatever, so it gets confusing

>>15355
I remember when I first watched the anime the CG was so bad that I didn’t remotely recognize that these were supposed to be the same characters. It made me wonder why they opted to use it. Was there not enough time to draw or was it just artsy? It was rough. Rewatching it later I got the BD and I thought I had experienced the Mandela effect or something until I saw this image.

Personally I don’t think even if the episode and this scene had been different when it first aired that it would have had significant impact on the Vocaloid scene or history at the time. I do think it’s really cool to see Vocaloid series adapted into other media, however it’s always either detracted from the original art or simply wasn’t written in a way that felt natural like the song. There’s a good Vocaloid series adaptions that I have enjoyed and felt natural, but it proved to me at least that creating adaptations from music isn’t as easy as it seems by comparison.

>>15374
>>15376
>>15377
All these metrics are a mixed bag in terms of reliability. In some regard they help to give a really good idea of things but aren’t often a perfect representation of the overall picture. The Vocaloid search metric for example makes a lot of sense when you consider how people were first learning about and getting into Vocaloid as well as the early beginnings of the current day anime fandom. More people would stumble across Miku or Vocaloid and get curious and look it up, where today a lot of new fans are coming in from either dedicated games or game collabs and searching not through Google, but social media. It’s not a perfect explanation for other search terms but in that context makes sense.

What a lot of people in Japan at least refer to when it comes to “vocaloid dying” is the number of music releases and how much attention those songs gain based on the community at the time.

It’s also important to kinda note that a lot of those search metrics may likely be by repeat users. I used to, and still on occasion do, used to go to the same sites for Vocaloid all the time when I was young. Instead of remembering the url though, I’d just put “vocaloid” in the search bar.

>>15440
Could be lots of people are just using AI services these days instead of Google also. I think the amount of people that search it over and over again probably doesn't vary wildly from back in the day. But I agree for sure, the best metrics are amount of new releases and the attention they get.
Regardless though at the very least there ought to be some correlation with Vocaloid popularity and Google searches, so it's atleast an indicator. It's difficult to say whether Vocaloid is more popular today or back in the first boom based on this metric though.

>>12960
>>12960
(apologies in advance for blogpost)
I became a Vocaloid fan in 2008; I was 10 years old.

From the western side, our world was a lot smaller looking back — or it might just be my recollection since I wasn't using NND. At the time, it felt like we were all watching the same producers and small translators/reposters. Everyone listened to the same music, for the most part.

So when I bought Project Diva & PD 2nd for my PSP off of PlayAsia, I remember being so stunned and wondering what the fuck was going on in the OG community! Hardly half of the songs were recognizable to me. I didn't realize how small my world was when Youtube was all we had.

I used to fear it, but imo, the big move and prevalent use of Youtube was a net positive for the community. It's a lot easier to find small producers, and I feel like I'm locking onto someone new every month. My head would roll if I told 13-year-old me where the fandom is now.

And I still have no clue what the fuck Mekakucity Actors is about

>>15615
VocaDB has also been extremely useful

>>15379
I'm gonna be honest i didn't even listen to the songs that inspired Kagepro. I knew Jin but never really bothered to even check his music out (except Children Record, i think i heard that one somewhere else). I also didn't watch Kagepro when Tumblr was obsessing over it either so i missed out on that part of the early vocaloid fandom entirely. I'd watch it for the hot blue tomboy chick tho.

>>13016
>Real decline would be when veterans start gatekeeping
They're already doing this. I don't know how the newcomers behave on the Japanese side of the fandom, but they're notoriously disrespectful on the English side. "Don't let the newgens find this" (newgen is a slang term for new fans = "new generation") is a comment I see often on both old and new songs with sexual themes, or other taboo topics such as violence.

That being said though, I don't think any of the gatekeeping has been effective and with or without it, I don't see Vocaloid declining in popularity anytime soon.

>>15367
Who

>>23824
Ironically all the reliance on new age slang like newgen, Vocaboomer, or WVF is probably the clearest signal that someone has probably gotten into Vocaloid inside of this decade.

I would counter that even if Vocaloid is at an absolute height of popularity, Vocaloid being seen as immature is what caused many Japanese producers to flee to commercial music the fiest time when they had the chance. It's not exactly a character you want a fandom or subculture or fad to be colored with if you're interested in longevity or having people develop their skills around. Italian brainrot may be on top of the world right now, but so was Skibidi toilet.

>>23831
Not the guy you quoted but I wouldn't say those terms are 100% an indicator that someone's new. I use WVF and JVF to refer to the different sides of the fandom and have been a fan since 2011 (unless that era is still considered "new").

>>23832
half agree on "newgen" and "Vocaboomer" though

>>23832
That's really the least odious since it has a functional purpose to explain a real split, but it's also unnecessarily jargon-y. It's giving a collective label to a geography when you could probably say something more meaningful by narrowing it to western producers, western listeners, etc.

>>23835
I guess, but "Western Vocaloid Fandom" encapsulates both and WVF is just short for that, so it's convenient to use it when referring to both.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pLYKKC-EpjA

>>23825

>>23835
I feel like the Western jargon is meant to put the relevant cultural split into words. It’s just vaguely correlated to geography. I can’t think of a better way to describe it.

>>23825
Kagepro woman

>>23839
Personally I don't see what's wrong with "overseas fans" if you need to communicate the split. Subcultural identity being tied to geography isn't novel to Vocaloid, and even the Japanese will class their participation down to prefectures for club events or fan concerts, but the identity is so loose for "western" that I don't really see much utility in that category. Especially since I don't think it even really encompasses places like China properly. "WFH" as adopted label just stinks of stan culture to me, maybe.

>>23844
WVF*

>>23845
>>23844
I call them western fans because that's what everyone calls them but 90% of the time its used to refer to English speaking fans.

>>23844
Modern vocaloid fandom does overlap a little with stan culture as much as i hate to admit that. Though i highly doubt the term originated from there because I've seen it decades ago.

>>23844
>>23846
"Western Vocaloid fandom" should be used when generalizing about societies descended from Europe, or in contrast to the "Eastern Vocaloid fandom", which includes countries other than Japan. For Western internet communities, language can be more important than where you live, so if people are speaking English, "English speaking Vocaloid fandom" is more correct than "Western Vocaloid fandom". However, for Eastern online spaces, nationality often takes precedent, so "Japanese Vocaloid fandom" usually means people who not only speaks the language, but who is also ethnically and culturally Japanese. "Non-Japanese Vocaloid fandom" or "overseas Vocaloid fandom" can be used to refer to all Vocaloid fans who are not Japanese.