Vocaloid was developed as a DSP project at a Spanish university, supported by Yamaha, and first marketed in the UK - with almost zero success.

It wasn't until it was personalised/mythologised by combining it with anime in Japan that it really exploded. Crypton have very deliberately milked it for everything it's worth. Making the output branded but royalty-free was marketing genius.

One bizarre thing about it - it's converging with autotuned vocal stylings applied to organic human vocals, especially in genres like hyperpop. It's becoming increasingly hard to tell them apart.

Another bizarre thing - there's a kind of corrosive psychedelic "What does human mean?" aesthetic that applies to AI art in general. Vocaloid music is a subset of other emulated artforms: simultaneously cute, spectacular, and naive, but also disturbing, overwrought, and uncanny.

This looks very much like a new era, in the manner of Baroque, Romantic, and Modern. It's going to be explosively transformative for all of the arts, and it's not obvious yet that there's going to be much left that's still recognisable after the dust has settled.