Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-33060919-20180228003730/@comment-53539-20180228093502

Internet memes made her popular early on, were mainly the sole reason.

Popularity breeds popularity, she has so many songs and so much merchandise. Also in Japan, people see Miku as the symbol of Vocaloid itself, much like they see Pikachu as a symbol for Pokémon. Based its sort of icon worshipping.

In vocaloid2 she sold 40,000 units in her first year, most of any vocaloid that generation and by the time everyone had her they either realised Vocaloid was a fade and moved on or got bored of it... Vocaloid isn't as useful as it seems and unless you were making it for other vocaloid fans, it wasn't that appealing. Basically she was the make or break vocal for a lot of fans and producers who either did or didn't get on board the vocaloid hype train. Those that did and stuck around became almost obsessed with her.

She then sold another 20,000 by 2010. A lot of the reasons was that despite vocaloids like the VYs coming onto the scene, Miku was considered easiest to use because her voice was flexible and could easily bend to how the producer wanted her to sound. If they didn't adjust her, she maintained her cuteness as she went up and down the octaves.

Basically a bunch of things happened to the point Miku has become a lot of people's first introduction to vocaloid. There is this mentality "Why own X vocaloid when I can have Miku?".

A lot of people put it down to marketing and things like that, but most didn't start until mid-2008 and by then she was already selling a lot by then... The serious marketing started in 2009. In fact there wasn't even any vocaloid "how to" guides for almost a year. Vocaloid sold by word of mouth in its first few years more then anything else. Marketing may have helped maintain her popularity, but it definitely didn't start it off. :-?

If nobody uses the better vocaloids, then they don't see more usage. It impacted the English vocaloids for a long time also, and was a big impact on the failure of the Spanish vocaloids.