What a good article. Given the bits about how related popular songs are, I can't believe we're far off from algorithmically generated songs being fed to a variety of meat-puppet stars. Or can we skip that and go right to CGI anime pop stars?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku
It mentions she has over 100,000 released songs, which I presume are mostly fan created.
I guess I was thinking more like a virtual pop star in the sense of the pop stars mentioned in the article: meticulously controlled, always-on-brand industrial product. Sort of like the way a virtual Tupac appeared at Coachella, but made from scratch so that the money all flows to the puppeteers.
Well, that's kind of what a group like Gorrilaz is, I think, although maybe not quite as industrial/mass-produced a product as you're suggesting.
Amazing. Japan, what will they think of next?
In short, Yamaha sells a music synthesizer IDE called Vocaloid, and one of its features is that you can add lyrics via voice synthesizer packages, and then control the tune, vibrato and whatnot. Several 3rd parties sell voice packages for Vocaloid, and usually they were just given names to distinguish them, but a company called Crypton made a voice package called Hatsune Miku, and marketed it along with visual assets and a minimal backstory.
Importantly, they released the character (not the software) under remix-friendly licenses that encourage (noncommercial) reuse, so fans sort of took Miku and made her their own in a very Gibsonesque "Idoru" sort of way. As such, the difference between Miku and bands like Gorillaz or similar is that here there's no particular artist behind the scenes. The company who owns Miku's copyright just makes software; the music comes from fans.
If they're making something outside of work and sharing the result on niconico for free, I don't know why I wouldn't.