There was a story a while back on NPR covering the live concerts with virtual characters, which is pretty interesting but I didn’t realize how cool Vocaloid really is until recently. It has basically opened up song writing and singing to the general public. With sites like ニコニコ動画 and koebu, anybody can write songs with Vocaloid and singers online can cover them. It basically splits up the parts of creating songs so that people online can collaborate to create regular songs. Aspiring song writers or singers can just get started online anytime and may even get picked up by record labels or get their songs used for animes. Yamaha, the creators of Vocaloid is plainly aware of this phenomen since it’s explained in a video right on their homepage.

Really cool, it’s like the open-source version of music.