BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) - Luo Tianyi’s New Years’ Day performance was sparsely attended by pop star standards, with only about 300 people in the audience. Then again, she was not there either.
To see Luo, one of China’s rising superstars, some 150 million tuned in to the live stream on their TVs and mobile devices. The teen singer is a vocaloid, the first Mandarin-speaking, computer-generated, voice-synthesised pop star.
The country is the latest market to embrace vocaloids, the most extreme mashup of technology and music. Though they developed in Japan and cast their influence on K-pop, China has the biggest potential audience, with an estimated 390 million people watching virtual idols.
The accompanying animation industry, which includes TV series and comics, hit US$35 billion (S$46 billion) in 2020, according to media company iQiyi.
From an animated cat dancing with American singer Paula Abdul in the 1990s to holograms that revived dead singers in the 2000s, the music industry has flirted with non-human performances for as long as the technology has allowed.
For a flat fee of US$225, creators get an audio editing software that can generate songs complete with synthetic human voices. Yamaha is now developing technology to make the voices more lifelike and allowing musical expressions unique to vocaloids.
With bright pop tunes, Luo exemplifies the genre. She is 15, with grey hair, green eyes and five million followers on Weibo. Her concerts sell out in minutes, she has sung and danced to Lang Lang's piano accompaniment, and CCTV put her in the line-up for its Spring Festival Gala alongside Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau and Italian opera star Andrea Bocelli.
More than a third of Luo's fans are born after 2000 and mostly located in China's bigger cities. Nescafe, KFC and other companies have used her songs in advertising campaigns. Harper's Bazaar put her image on the cover of its China edition.
All of this is the work of Shanghai Henian Technology, which is emerging as the nation's leading vocaloid impresario, with six performers. The company, which has offices in China and Japan, has focused on the business for about a decade. It once worked with Yamaha on virtual singers before buying the rights to Luo in 2015.
Japan's Hatsune Miku, the best-known vocaloid, offers a window into the potential opportunities for China's rising stars. In the 14 years since her debut, she has amassed more than 100,000 songs and a wide range of endorsement deals.
China's industry is estimated at US$100 million, though the knock-on effects are bigger. The video streaming site Bilibili that raised US$2.6 billion in a secondary listing this year started as fan forum Mikufans.cn.
"One thing that's kind of unique to vocaloid culture, compared with other amateur creative cultures, is that it's not just music that's being created," said Mr Hiroyuki Ito, chief executive of Crypton Future Media, which owns Miku.
"Someone would create a song, and someone else would attach a story or draw an illustration or make a music video." Vocaloid culture has narrowed the gap between amateur and professional music production, he added.
Take Kenshi Yonezu, who gained a following from his vocaloid music in 2009 before debuting in person. He eventually became the first artiste to land Billboard's song of the year in Japan for two years running.
In China, the approach is less grassroots. Vocaloids like Luo are promoted alongside human celebrities, appearing in variety shows, singing programmes, shopping festivals and live-stream content.
Managing vocaloids is not necessarily easier than working with human stars. For Luo's New Years' Day performance, Shanghai Henian spent months plotting her outfits, visual effects and movement across the stage.
"When you think of a human performer, the size of the singer does not change regardless of camera movements," said Ms Candy Huang, director of operations at Luo's company.
"However, Luo is a virtual character - to achieve the correct size relative to camera movements, and yet not breaking the illusion that she should be real - this requires an enormous amount of calculation and high-tech skills."
Going forward, Shanghai Henian is working on fusing Luo with artificial intelligence to let her think independently and communicate with fans, as well as riding on a recent hype in gu feng - a type of music inspired by traditional Chinese music and history, added Ms Huang.
"She may be forever 15, but we have to upgrade her to fit changing consumer tastes," she said.