Vtubers are like so yesterday. Beantubers are the next big thing 
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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v-tubers are a kind of animated avatar that people use on streaming platforms; places where you're sort of expected to have a webcam showing your reactions, but you don't want to because you're [trans and dysphoric, afraid of openly being a girl on the internet, shy, actually a dragon deep down, some other valid reason, or even an invalid reason because who cares]. They work various ways; some make the avatar try to map to what you're saying, some puppet it from keyboard controls, some try to match it to a webcam's output, whatever.
Hatsune Miku is a rubber band ball made of memes. There was a corporate mascot at some point, but tens of thousands of people have made her mean whatever they want her to mean, building layer after layer of conflicting meanings, until that's all there is. She's just Hatsune Miku.
She's just Hatsune Miku.
That's Hatsune Miku, Creator of Minecraft, thank you very much.
Hatsune Miku could be considered the very first digital character actor to achieve fame. But she's quite different to vtubers.
Miku is a 100% fabrication. She is a character that uses software called Vocaloid, a voice synthesiser, to sing. They make songs for her using it and then make digital/cgi/animated shorts for the songs. She performs gigs through a 3d projection.
Vtubers on the other hand are human beings using software to appear as animated characters. They do the same job as streamers do but they do it via a character that they perform as to varying degrees of quality. Some amateur vtubers perform mostly as themselves but with an animated avatar, whereas professional companies with fulltime staff have performers staying fully in character. The professional side of this new industry operates similar to the idol industry. They're wage paid contracted performers who leave within a few years because it's ultimately a dead end job with no growth. The industry is completely cutthroat too and performers are treated pretty much exactly the same way idols are treated. I suspect it's actually worse for the vtuber performers because they're not getting famous from it either, they're nobodies when off screen.
Gotta correct you a bit: The vtubers that leave big corporations generally are able to keep their popularity if they choose to strike out on their own. Even if they cannot directly tell anyone who they used to be, the corporation also cannot force them to not stream on their own and it's not hard to realize that this new person with the same voice and mannerisms as the other person you liked are in fact one and the same. And once one person realizes, they will spread the news.
Also, many of the people recruited into corporate vtubing are some level of famous beforehand and they will let their fans know through the rumor mill that they are gonna be vtubing for the corpos. Not hard to use the same rumor mill when they leave.
Sharon Apple from Macross Plus hasn't seemed that far fetched for a long time now.
I know jack shit about the idol industry. I thought they were like pop stars and could get mega rich and famous?
I thought they were like pop stars and could get mega rich and famous?
Mega famous yes.
They make their company mega rich yes, they don't get mega rich though lol. They get used up and tossed out.
Damn, they need a union.
They face a similar issue to games industry workers, it's hard to unionise them because such a huge number of people want to work in the industry. They are hyper exploited because they can be replaced, and they're young and naive so they don't advocate for themselves very well. Any negativity also doesn't fit idol culture and can harm your career.
Idols know they're in direct competition with one another and with other idol groups. They all want to make it big. 99% of them will not and the industry chews them up and spits them out.
Think of idols like the music industry but if the singers were just on a contract with a wage within an "idol company" that is effectively the owner of their future. It's not helped by the age issue and most idols aging out of the work and "graduating" before they reach the kind of age in life where you'd start fighting back. Graduation is a useful tool of hiding whether the idol was let go by not renewing their contract or quit. And of course every single person graduating will always say it's on good terms because if you don't and you cause a fuss well you're never getting a job in the industry again.
The only exception I can really think of are Perfume, who started out as idols but kinda became their own thing and are now in I think their 25th year as a group together
Generally, that's KPop idols not Japanese idols. Even then only the cream of the crop. At least if you mean broad international recognizition and appeal when you say mega rich and famous. The Japanese idol industry does have big money but has been dwarved by its neighbor. Both have absolutely fanatical fans though
Also vtubers aren't really a generational thing, think of them as the weebs of 15 years ago and I think that's the broad social categorization of the fan base, at least in the west.
a v-tuber, or virtual tuber, is a kind of root vegetable that grows naturally on the internet
I think you might be telling furphies mate. You wouldn't try to pull a fast one wouldja?
the invention of v-tubers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5E-1cZd-sI
History repeats itself. First as a Simpsons joke then as farce.
Hatsune Miku is a completely different thing. Hatsune Miku is a character/voice for a synthetic instrument called Vocaloid which is developed and owned by Yamaha. It's a pretty cool piece of software where you input lyrics and a midi pattern, then the characters "sing". Basically people became fans of the marketing design for the Hatsune Miku character specifically and it blew up from there.
So like autotune + speech synth?
Hatsune Miku's tech was a big deal when it released because it was the first vocal synth that needed zero human input. Every other vocal synth at the time needed human speech samples to work.
That was like 20 years ago, though. Now it's all memes and holographic concerts.
Miku's voice provider is Saki Fujita
Really? Then I fell for the marketing, too.
Hatsune Miku is a digital musical instrument, a piece of software which allows people to generate singing in a robotic Japanese voice by manually tuning each note. This is different from "AI" voice song generation because it actually requires work and skill and predates it by at least a decade. The blue haired character is the mascot of this piece of software, and the company behind it uses that mascot in various tie-in products like video games. There is no specific real human behind the Miku character.
Vtubers are like twitch streamers, but they're behind a fancy mask called a "model" which is animated by face and/or body tracking. Each one corresponds to a specific real human. The big/popular ones are part of agencies, generally out of Japan with corresponding Japanese-style workplace abuse. There are also people who do vtubing on their own, and generally have much less detailed and less animated models, all the way down to just bouncing a png of a face when they talk.
Yes, live performances by both are just on a screen, but with the other things I'm told people like about live events, like a big soundsystem and a crowd of fellow fans.
So vtubers are just people playing games/reacting to stuff/talking to paying chat customers under a stage persona and costume that they may not own like any other actor. But the digital instrument is more like a specific synth you might license.
With the synth who owns the music? and if anyone can license it then who is putting on the concerts?
Where does graduation come into this?
Yes, pretty much. Vtubers stream like other streamers but show their models instead of their own faces, and lots of them do karaoke streams or even original songs, which leads into the concerts. Graduation is retirement either from the company that owns their model or from streaming entirely. In the former case, they may pop back up later with a different model either streaming independently or with a different agency.
For an example of Miku's licensing, probably the most famous Miku song is "World is Mine" which was written by a composer named ryo and performed by his band Supercell. I'm not sure exactly what deal was struck between their label, Sony Music, and Crypton Future Media, the makers of the Vocaloid software Miku is the mascot and most popular voice of to make the concerts. Anyone is allowed to use the Miku character for noncommercial purposes with attribution, her image is CC BY-NC.
Graduation is just the word vtubers use for when they retire as a character
Oooh it sounds so sinister haha
It's copied from the idol industry. They use it to avoid saying "yeah the performer quit the job" and to create a culture of not asking questions about why the performers quit.
"gawr gura was sent to live on a farm upstate"
"can i visit her?"
"no"