'Forever 15' virtual idol headlines China's vocaloid industry

BEIJING • Luo Tianyi's New Year's Day performance was sparsely attended by pop star standards, with only about 300 people physically present in the audience. Then again, she was not there either.

To see Luo, one of China's rising superstars, some 150 million tuned in to the live stream on their TV sets and mobile devices. The teen singer is a vocaloid, the first Mandarin-speaking, computer-generated, voice-synthesised pop star.

China is the latest market to embrace vocaloids, the most extreme mash-up of technology and music.

Though they were first developed in Japan and cast their influence on K-pop, China has the biggest potential audience, with an estimated 390 million watching virtual idols.

The accompanying animation industry, which includes TV series and comics, hit US$35 billion (S$46 billion) last year, according to media company iQiyi.

For a flat fee of US$225, creators get an audio editing software that can generate songs complete with synthetic human voices. Yamaha is now developing technology to make the voices more lifelike and allowing musical expressions unique to vocaloids.

With bright pop tunes, Luo exemplifies the genre. She is 15, with grey hair, green eyes and five million followers on Weibo. Her concerts sell out in minutes, she has sung and danced to Lang Lang's piano accompaniment, and CCTV put her in the line-up for its Spring Festival Gala alongside Andy Lau and Andrea Bocelli.

More than a third of Luo's fans were born after 2000 and mostly located in China's bigger cities. Nescafe, KFC and other firms have used her songs in advertisements. Harper's Bazaar put her image on the cover of its China edition.

All of this is the work of Shanghai Henian Technology, which is emerging as China's leading vocaloid impresario, with six performers. The company, which has offices in China and Japan, has focused on the vocaloid business for about a decade.

Japan's Hatsune Miku, the best-known vocaloid, offers a window into the potential opportunities - and limits - for China's rising stars.

In the 14 years since her debut, Miku has amassed more than 100,000 songs and a wide range of endorsement deals.

China's industry is estimated at US$100 million, though the knock-on effects are bigger: The video streaming site Bilibili that raised US$2.6 billion in a secondary listing this year started as the fan forum Mikufans.cn.

"One thing that's kind of unique to vocaloid culture, compared with other amateur creative cultures, is that it's not just music that's being created," said Mr Hiroyuki Ito, chief executive of Crypton Future Media, which owns Miku. "Someone would create a song, and someone else would attach a story or draw an illustration or make a music video."

Managing vocaloids is not necessarily easier than working with human stars.

For Luo's New Year's Day performance, Shanghai Henian spent months plotting her outfits, visual effects and movements.

"Luo is a virtual character - to achieve the correct size of her body relative to camera movements, and yet not breaking the illusion that she should be real - this requires an enormous amount of calculation and high-tech skills," said Ms Candy Huang, director of operations at Luo's company.

Shanghai Henian is now working on fusing Luo with artificial intelligence to let her think independently and communicate with fans, as well as riding on a recent hype in gu feng - a type of music inspired by traditional Chinese music and history, Ms Huang said.

"She may be forever 15, but we have to upgrade her to fit changing consumer tastes," she said.

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