Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-24.214.82.9-20160329213055/@comment-53539-20160330085356

Its harder to judge the "western" fandom as it pretty much counts a large audience and does not just include English speakers, but others too. I would say that while Vocaloid is now not "new" and is more then a decade old, and has been popular for nearly a decade now with a growth of nearly 20% in 2014 as a franchise... That its not done just yet and has not hit its height mark yet.

What we need is a property to compare with thats also a decade old... Lets see the most recent in the news I know of is Twitter. Pretty much, a decade on with 300 million subscribers, Twitter has and its growth has gone down % wise. This makes convincing investors to invest in the company harder for that reason. And thats a BIG property... So for a smaller property like Vocaloid to still be growing at 1/5 rate in a year is good.

But this doesn't answer the question of how it is doing in the west... Well... If we look at the spanish vocaloids... Bruno and Clara pretty much are the most unpopular vocaloids of all right now, while Maika is nearer the top of the bottom section. This produces a mixed bag to go by and an't be used to judge anything by... also because they have not been out long and have only a few versions, we cannot use them.

That leaves falling back onto the English versions that have been around the longest and are the second largest chunk of Vocaloids libraries. We have Japanese -> English vocals and the "Engloids" which would appeal to western audiences in this case. Now the number of English vocals grew a lot in V3 and we had more then double the amount we had in V1 + V2. This means that now there is a lot of English vocals to choose from and a strong selection for western producers to buy into. Yet its more likelty they will buy Japanese versions over Engloids... Yet... Avanna is a mould breaker and proved that Engloids can compete with the bottom end of the Japanese vocaloids in terms of sales. Its a start when you consider that PowerFX and past Zero-G Vocaloids struggled to get noticed, with perhaps the exception of Oliver. Then we got the fairly popular Cyber Diva, who had a good reception. Ruby had drama because fans jumped on the controversial bandwagon, which was not fair to the vocaloid, Syo, and others, especially when SeeU and YANHE technically had fair more damaging controversies in comparison. But the real deal here is Dex and Daina who in a few weeks almost stole the crown from Avanna on who the top Zero-G product is for an entire year. Considering that its guessed that to be no.1 means you were successful, and that means in the year you basically got that precious 1,000 unit mark, Daina and Dx did that within a few weeks.

There are still English vocals on the way and we are still getting quite a few. To top it off, if you look at Statu you can see developers like Ah software are still interested in English and have them planned. We also have the release of the Kagamine English... Luka V4x... And the upcoming likely Miu V4x and English updates... Nana plus with a tweaked English vocal... So I would gander that the overall reaction in the west is still growing and even we have not hit our height yet - at least in terms of English speaking.

Back when I joined in the 2009/2010 period it was rare for me to come across a fan who would declare themselves a Engloid fan, or a fan of English Vocaloid in general. And there much bias with the majority of the fandom not willing to give more then the Japanish Vocaloids a time of day. Now there are more, though a few bias still exist within the fandom that don't think English vocaloid is any good and the sun shines out of the butts of whatever Japan developers produce - even when its a Galaco (VOCALOID3) Prize quality product. But a lot of those who once thought the Japanese vocaloids were flawless are more accepting they have flaws. To me this is better then what it was even if they remain bias as it means their not completely "blind bias". Yet the acceptance of more Vocaloids means there is more interest in Vocaloid in turn, so we still have this much growth as well to take into account.

As I said its really hard to judge this because we only have two western languages to judge the success of Vocaloid as a product. It all depends on what you are exactly looking at here. But either way, bare in mind what we will have lost is the "trend followers" at this point, they've moved onto the next big craze... And honestly... I don't count them as much of importance. They got bored, went for something more shiny, pardon me saying this but I've seen it so often its not something I concern myself with. :-/