Hatsune Miku

Released in August 2007 by Crypton Future Media, Hatsune Miku is a Vocaloid voicebank — a synthesiser built from samples of the voice actress Saki Fujita — sold with a mascot on the box: a sixteen-year-old girl with turquoise twintails. The name means the first sound of the future. She has no songs of her own. Everything she sings was written by somebody who bought the software.

It first appeared in 2007, during early YouTube.

She is the first mass-scale character owned by her audience rather than a studio. Tens of thousands of songs, and the art, choreography and animation around them, were made by people with no connection to the company, and Crypton's decision to license that rather than suppress it is why she still exists. She performs live as a projection to arenas of people holding lightsticks for someone who is not there.

Miku has opened for Lady Gaga, appeared on American late-night television, and had a Vocaloid ecosystem grow around her that constitutes one of the largest bodies of amateur music ever made. She is the strongest counter-example to the idea that internet culture must be individual and short-lived: a fictional performer, nearly twenty years old, with a professional discography written by strangers.