One of the world’s biggest pop stars specialises in J-pop and dance pop; she is 16 years old, 5 feet 2 in (1.57 m), and her star sign is Virgo. Her voice has featured in over 100,000 songs. Her concerts regularly sell out in her native Japan. Hatsune Miku toured the US and performed on The Late Show with David Letterman in 2014. She has supported Lady Gaga in concert and collaborated with Pharrell Williams. She has more than 2.5 million Facebook fans and a cult following on YouTube. And she doesn’t actually exist, except as a computer-generated hologram. Miku is a voice-synthesizer program first released in 2007, and a human ‘image’ was developed by Crypton Future Media as part of an extensive marketing strategy initially aimed at professional musicians and producers. The Vocaloid voice-synthesizing software allows users to create open-sourced songs using vocal samples with Japanese or English pronunciation. Zoladz (2014) argues that Miku’s launch was ‘perfect timing’ in terms of the democratisation of music production and distribution and opportunities for fans to share their Mikucompositions. In 2009, Miku began to give concerts. From 2011, Miku was marketed in the US and in 2013 a version with English pronunciation was released. The cybercelebrity’s commercial endorsements include partnerships with Domino’s Pizza, Google, Sega, Sapporo, Toyota and Yamaha; her merchandising ranges from dolls, noodles and video games to lamps, clothing, comics (to name just a small selection) and she has her own shop in Tokyo. Miku is an internet idol with a cult following.
In his classification of different kinds of celebrity, Rojek coined the term celetoid to describe what he argued were short-lived celebrities who ‘are organized around mass communication and staged authenticity’ and celetoids as ‘lottery winners, one-hit wonders, stalkers, whistle-blowers, sports’ arena streakers, have-ago heroes, mistresses of public figures and the various other social types who command media attention one day, and are forgotten the next’ (2001: 20–21). Rojek also coined the term celeactor to describe a subcategory of celetoids that encompass fictional characters, such as Mickey Mouse, Ali G or Lara Croft, who demand high levels of fantasy in the audience and become ‘institutionalized features of popular culture’ (2001: 23, 26). It is hard to argue that Miku’s celebrity, or indeed that of Mickey Mouse, is short-lived, however, and Rojek’s assertion does not recognise the ongoing and longstanding cultural, and indeed, economic impact of such celebrities.
