Supercell's Supercell featuring Hatsune Miku

The lead singer on Supercell’s eponymous first album is Hatsune Miku—a Vocaloid character created by Crypton Future Media with voice synthesizers. A virtual superstar, over 100,000 songs, uploaded mostly by fans, are attributed to her. Supercell is a Japanese creator music group with the composer Ryo leading ten artists, who design album illustrations and make music videos. These videos are uploaded onto Niconico and other video-sharing sites. By the time Supercell was released in March 2009, the group’s Vocaloid works were already well-known to Niconico users and fans. This book explores the Vocaloid and DTM (desktop music) phenomena through the lenses of media and fan studies, looking closely at online social media platforms, the new technology for composing, avid fans of the Vocaloid character, and these fans’ performative practices. It provides a sense of how interactive new media and an empowered fan base combine to engage in the creation processes and enhance the circulation of DTM works.

33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-basedbooks and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

Author Biography

Keisuke Yamada is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is currently working on a long-term ethnographic project involving the shamisen (Japanese three-stringed instrument) in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America, especially focusing on the transnational circulation of the materials from which the instrument is made. His work has appeared in Asian Music, Ethnomusicology Review, and the Journal of World Popular Music, among others.