Meet Hatsune Miku. The First Crowdsourced Pop Idol.

She has released over 100,000 songs and movies, driven tens of millions of YouTube hits, and plays sold-out live concerts.

She also isn't real.

She's Hatsune Miku, and she's a collective creation of a remarkably lifelike voice-synthesizing software by Yamaha called VOCALOID and thousands of fans around the world.

The software allows fans to write songs for Hatsune Miku, which she sings. Free software is also available to animate the songs.

 This video explains the movement that has grown up around this virtual idol.

 There's a fascinating article about the phenomenon at this link.

One of her songs from a concert in Tokyo attended by 160,000 fans.
I find this weird, hilarious, and sort of terrifying on a lot of levels all at once.

As the article explains,

Whatever your feelings about the artistry or technology of the MikuPa concert, the cultural importance of Hatsune Miku’s success shouldn’t be ignored. I can’t think of another virtual character that has enjoyed such a bizarre form of persistent stardom. The crowd-sourced aspect of her performances are key to understanding her long term impact. Virtual characters are available to consumers in a way that human pop stars will never be. You can own Hatsune Miku. You can put her in your home and make her sing. You can dedicate hours to creating a perfect song for her and share it with the world, becoming famous along the way and maybe making some money as well. She may be the next generation of media. Just as video killed the radio star, virtuality could kill the pop star. I’m really not sure at this point if characters like Hatsune Miku will claim a small sliver of the music world and stay on the fringe or if they’ll explode to conquer the globe.

I'm fascinated by the whole phenomenon of crowdsourcing. It's a revelation of the true power of the internet to make possible collective collaboration on a scale and at a depth completely impossible before now.

It is truly changing our world in ways that are utterly unprecedented, for good and for ill.

I'm currently working on a crowdsourced project of my own that I'll be revealing in the next few weeks. I hope that you'll join me in that experiment when it's ready to go.

P.