Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26426525-20150524214902/@comment-53539-20160508120316

I'm going to have to break this up to reply. ^_^'

Still, most of the female vocals weren't that successful, because producers stick to popular ones like Miku, IA, and Rin.
 * It depends, if they had been male they'd been least useful, but there was a lot of vocals suddenly on the market too. Each vocaloid costs a lot of money so not all producers can afford every vocal.  With so many vocals suddenly producers were bound to pick and choose what they wanted.

''Around the V3 era, we got a lot of mid-range Japanese female vocals and while some like Yukari, Flower, and Rana got fairly popular, vocals like Mew, Merli, Kokone, AnoKano, and Chika were pretty much ignored. ''
 * This is hard to judge...
 * Mew was decently popular but had a rep of being hard to use. But she is still being sold and even is in the Mobile VOCALOID Editor.  i think its a simple case of being relatively low-profile but gathering decent sales, like Avanna did.  Avanna went under the radar for a long time.
 * Merli was a "bad guy" and so was a little difficult to really talk about, being a sort of antagonist to Lapis' sort of protagonist... Its difficult really to say much. But in addition, she suffers like a lot of these vocals from being a late-engine vocal. So once V4 was rolled out, thats it for V3. :-/
 * Chika also has the issues of being the same vocal type as gumi. while Kokone is the same type, she doesn't sound close enough to Gumi to be a clone, but chika is basically Gumi with a bigger range. Aside from more triphones and bigger range slightly, she just didn't bring enough to the table and a month later... We had V4. :-/

The moe vocals like Rion, Lapis, and Mayu didn't fare too well either because when producers want a moe vocal they just use Miku or Rin's appends or set IA or Luka's GEN extremely low
 * Lapis was decently popular. We'd not have Merli I suppose if she wasn't and plus she keeps getting new merch for her and additions. Merli and Lapis are both on Mobile Vocaloid Editor and enjoyed moderate to real success on IVOCALOID and VocaloWitter.
 * Tone Rion pretty much is the only one here I'd call a failure because of Moe. she pretty much was catering to a audience who'd already taken to other vocaloids and was the only one trying to actually be Moe. :-/

Also I'm not sure why but Fukase is getting like, really popular for some reason, it might be because of his voice provider but Idk.
 * Yeah, he got good reviews too pre-release and a lot of interest. They gave half the interest in the English version, but the Japanese vocal sparked a lot of buzz.  I think it was because though they'd had the type of vocal before, they'd never had the vocal trait before.  the vocal itself sort of stand out as a nice vocal.  Compared to Arsloid, it also sounds nice.

''I think him having an English voicebank offers more flexibility to western producers and a lot of the western fandom has been begging for male vocals but since we're talking about Japan here I'm kind of scratching my head. ''
 * I think its less of asking asking for males, because we've always had more and more of a case of "OMG decent English at last from Japan!". Many of us were expecting worst then we got and it seemed like they were embarrassed about his vocal. There was no certification of quality or anything and everyone expected worst then we got.  To top it off, it went well with vocal types we'd had for english natives like Oliver or Yohioloid.  Though the English hd less focus then the Japanese, it contradicted a lot of expectations.

Anyway, I think male producers are their own vocalists, like Hachi for example, which is why they don't need male Vocaloids.
 * I think its more to do with the culture... And it attitudes towards gender stereotypes and bias. Boy bands often get a lot the same attention here in the west as girls do in Japan. :-/

However male vocals that are popular, for example Len and Gackpo, are for in respective order, being the only male character vocal that's voice acted and being voiced by a famous singer.
 * Gackpo's been loosing popularity over time, he is getting to be the bottom of the big 8 in terms of popularity. And though Len's VA was a decent VA in terms of popularity, the vocal is neither male nor from a professional or popular singer. And Ryuto is Voice acted too. In fact... Miku's is... Luka's was...

 VY2, Kiyoteru, and ZOLA Project are just standard male vocals, so they don't have any special traits or anything (this statement does not reflect my own opinion, but of the producers) I presume Fukase might be getting so popular because of his combination of "unique voice" (Idk, he's androgynous sounding but different from Len or Piko) and "famous singer voice provider" (though nowhere as popular as Gackt, the band is popular right now in Japan)
 * Hmm... VY2 was the best vocal in V2, with a nice all-round vocal, but he fell victim to being male in a female demanding market. He was distinct for his quality and abilities to sound good compared to all other male vocals, one of V2's highest quality vocals.
 * Kiyoteru had a bad reputation in V2. Take note, a lot of the V2-V4 updates from Ah software were due to V2's retirement, which occurred in March. Yuki may have seen extra vocals if the VA was able to be reused and recontacted and miki's VA has apparently retired. I have a funny feeling if the circumstances were different both would have had a XSY vocal like Iroha and Kiyoteru. :-/
 * Sony spoiled the PR with Piko and he was only a MQ vocal released at the same time as the HQ Len Appends. Releasing a demo that last 6 days and you can't upload meant everyone got ticked off, especially when demos were removed from Nico video.  IT was a joint level effort that brought him down. Plus at this stage, the market was still heavy with demand to females, which there wasn't yet enough of in V2.
 * Zola is a backup band mostly. You get 3 vocals with traits unique to them, but alas... The fault is that those 3 vocals have limited ranges and aren't meant to really be soloists and such.  Its a niche market issue.  a lot of male vocals have to result to gimmicks to sell well, they were basically this.  They work best when used with other male vocals, more then females too... Really hard to know what to do with them and i don't know if many producers could handle them too well. :-/

But another thing to consider is that female producers like kaoling, Tiara, OSTER Project, and HitoshizukuP don't have preferences for male Vocaloids over female (well I know OSTER Project is a lesbian but I'm talking about female producers in general and that's kind of irrelevant) 
 * Niche markets. You either fill them as  product people didn't know they wanted or fill them and get ignored. There were a lot of V3s released like that as they had to compete with other vocals and they were trying to grasp something to call their own like Zola or Yukari. :-/
 * Popularity breed more usage, if Miku is popular more are likely to buy and use her. If a product is seen as unpopular people are less likely to use it.  Engloids.  Until Avanna everyone used to just say "meh" and how Engloids would never be popular.  Even with Avanna becoming no.1 for the first time, someone said those cringe worthy words about how the other Zero-G vocaloids must have done less well for her to be no.1.  This was blown out of the water when a year later she got no.1 again.  At this point, English vocaloid is catching up slowly and more demand is there. :-/

So maybe it could be that 1) everyone hates male vocals or 2) the same issue as "Big 8 plus IA" being popular who knows.
 * Yukari, VY1 both are also popular. VY1 became popular mostly tho due to the fact you get her vocal in so many forms.  IA is mostly due to both the popularity of her provider, being female and being overall a dam useful vocal.  i was surprised myself when I recently added the V3 stats that IA took things like "largest tempo range".  Most vocaloids manage one or two top marks within a engines lifespan, while IA had several... Yukari's is due to several things, her uniqueness from all other females meant she found her own niche to occupy and it turned out she was a vocal they didn't know they wanted I guess... and voiceroid and other things. :-/

 also when Arsloid's demo was out back in summer 2015 everyone was hyping him because his voice type but then his quality turned out to be not that good and everyone forgot about him
 * I never saw too much hype compared to Fukase, from what I saw Zola had more hype.

I don't know what to say, haven't looked up Kiyoteru too much this generation. V4's a real mixed bag of trick and traps.