There is much to be said about the uniqueness of this year’s Coachella artists—but there is one performer that is quite different than every other musician on the bill.
Hatsune Miku is not real.
What started as a virtual instrument that simulated the voice of a Japanese girl in 2007 has evolved into a cultural icon. The character design created for this musical tool has appeared in a number of anime productions, commercials and video games—and has achieved global fame.
Hatsune Miku, on Coachella’s not-to-be 2020 lineup, is slated to finally make her Coachella debut on Saturday, April 13 and 20. The show will feature Miku as a virtual performer, with intense visuals and a live band accompanying her.
“The core principle of the show hasn’t really changed much in the past decade,” said Riki Tsuji, a member of the global business team at Crypton Future Media, developers of Hatsune Miku. She has been touring since 2014; Tsuji and the team at Crypton have kept the main concept intact as the technology has advanced exponentially.
“We’ve mostly made refinements rather than any sort of major technological changes to the setup,” Tsuji said. “We’re always looking for whatever new options there are out there for us to present this concert, since it does have very special technological needs that a lot of other artists wouldn’t, but we’re not necessarily always trying to change up the formula. … For a lot of fans, it’s less about the technology, and it’s more about the creative community around Hatsune Miku.”
That creative community is what’s made Hatsune Miku so iconic.
“Miku, first and foremost, is a piece of software, so all of the songs Miku performs onstage were made by individual creators and fans,” Tsuji said. “The character herself definitely has a following and a draw, but I think what makes Hatsune Miku special is not just the fact that this character is onstage singing to huge crowds, but the fact that the people who made the songs are in the crowd with the other fans. A lot of artists and a lot of celebrities will be like, ‘Oh, it’s all thanks to the fans,’ but in the case of Hatsune Miku, it’s quite literally thanks to the fans, because without the people buying the software, creating fan art, making music videos, etc., none of this would be possible. Hatsune Miku is made by the fans for the fans.”
Utilizing the Hatsune Miku software has allowed musicians to collaborate with the character.
“In the case of any professional recording artist, producers will reach out to composers and producers who they like, or who they want to work with,” Tsuji said. “That’s always a possible career path … especially with the internet these days, to start as a kid on SoundCloud, and then you end up making beats for Kanye or something. In the case of Hatsune Miku, that’s a very, very direct pipeline to go from consumer to a creator…We’ve been in the business of helping creators create since way before Hatsune Miku was even conceived. Hatsune Miku probably couldn’t have come out from any other company, really, because this wasn’t a character concept first. She was very much software—she was an instrument, and the package character just happened to catch on like wildfire.”
Hatsune Miku’s live set is preprogrammed, but that doesn’t mean that her setlist his always the same. Miku’s Coachella set will range from early YouTube’s viral hit “World Is Mine” by ryo, to newer songs. Tsuji noted that the community aspect of Hatsune Miku continues to hold importance in her live show.
“For Miku Expo, the concert tour series that we do outside of Japan, once every two years or so, we would do a song contest where the winner would have their song performed by Miku onstage for a tour,” Tsuji said. “We’re always looking at the newest uploads, what’s coming up, what’s popular, what people are listening to—but we’re not a big company, so we don’t have the ears or the time to catch every single release that’s going up at the same time. There are so many people out there who make incredible stuff, but nobody knows about them, because maybe they’ve never posted, or maybe they just are not good at posting and aren’t getting the views for some reason or another, so the contest is one of the ways we try to mitigate that and uplift the lesser-known creators.”
Tsuji said Crypton will often reach out to Miku’s fans to collaborate. “For example, if we were doing a sneaker-brand collaboration, and the brand wanted a little theme song to promote the collaboration, we don’t have any creators in-house, so we would go out to the community, see who’s coming up, who’s new, or if there’s an established creator who likes that brand or something like that, and we would pick out someone from the community who we think would be a good fit.”
Coachella’s 2024 lineup is the festival’s most varied yet—and Hatsune Miku is just one of a handful of artists representing Japan in this year’s lineup.
“It’s very exciting to be a part of this rise in interest overseas toward Japanese music,” Tsuji said. “Miku has had a lot of international fans in the past, but it’s always been very subculture, underground kind of stuff. It’s been mostly an internet following, but to have that become, and be considered, a primary Japanese cultural export is pretty cool. It might not look like it from outside of Japan, but Miku’s influence on the Japanese music industry in the past decade is actually pretty crazy. One of the other Japanese acts performing at Coachella this year is YOASOBI, and the composer, Ayase, got his start as a Miku producer, and then he got a major label deal from getting noticed by A&R directors. Someone who started out using our software in his bedroom climbed up the ranks of being popular on YouTube, getting noticed, and then getting the label deal, and now he’s performing at Coachella.”
Hatsune Miku’s robotic voice has helped popularize the Vocaloid genre, which focuses on artists using vocal software to craft upbeat and catchy tunes heavily influenced by Japanese culture.
“Streaming has made this a little more or less irrelevant, but if you look at Japanese Top 40 charts these days, I can bet good money that a large majority of the artists either grew up listening to Vocaloid music, or are working with producers who have been influenced by Vocaloid music, or are themselves people who came up in the Vocaloid music scene,” Tsuji said. “A lot of the major artists working in the Japanese music industry right now, and a lot of the producers and track-makers behind the scenes, got their start using not just Miku, but Vocaloid software in general, and the culture surrounding Vocaloid. That’s a point of pride that we have at our company, that our software really does serve as a great entry point for anybody to start making music.”
Miku’s Coachella set has been four years in the making—meaning it is not to be missed.
“This is our first time being back on tour outside of Japan in four years,” Tsuji said. “Our last Miku Expo tour was in 2020, right before COVID hit. … We haven’t been back in North America since 2018, so we’re very excited to see all of the fans over there again. We have some new things in store, so we hope we’re able to not just bring the hits and have fans enjoy what they know, but maybe a couple of surprises that they didn’t see coming. … We’ve been working behind the scenes on stuff, so we are pretty confident that this will be a very special show for people to remember.”
Edited on April 9 to clarify the set list and remove the word “hologram.”