Vocaloid Popularity:
An Investigation
DATA ANALYSIS
SURVEY
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According to the participants’ answers, popularity of Vocaloid as a culture is viewed as both decreasing and not decreasing, with the percentages (Yes = 49.2% and No = 50.8%) having little difference, not enough to draw a majority answer.
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The most popular reason for decline given by decline supporters is “Less new good songs”, with “Less songs from already popular producers” following closely behind. The opinion indicated in the hypothesis “because there have been less songs uploaded” is in 5th place, indicating the prediction to be an unpopular reason.
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In the 252 participants investigated, 44 were introduced to Vocaloid in year 2011, the highest number of people among all years. After 2011, the number of people introduced to Vocaloid began to consistently decrease (easily visible here in color), suggesting a fall in popularity of Vocaloid.
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Most participants discovered a new favourite song within 1 month prior to answering the survey. This data is unsuggestive of any noteworthy conclusions.
GOOGLE TRENDS
Figure 1. Trend lines and correlation coefficients (r-squared) of Web search data, trend split at July 2012
Figure 2. Trend lines and correlation coefficients (r-squareds) of YouTube search data, trend split at September 2011
The graphs plotted from the data collected shows two obvious trends: an increasing trend then a decreasing trend. The average correlation efficient for the decreasing trend across all 4 graphs is 0.845997, suggesting a strong, linear, negative correlation between time and search interest on both Web and YouTube. It is safe to conclude that after the peak popularity period (end of 2011 – beginning of 2012), search interest in Vocaloid-related terms began to decrease, suggesting a possible decrease of interest in Vocaloid culture.
GRAPHS - FRITZ
Looking at the number of new Original Vocaloid songs uploaded to NicoNico weekly, we can observe a gradual decrease beginning in middle 2012. The 1-year moving mean plot depicts this decrease best and is rather obvious.
Looking into the number of new Vocaloid songs posted monthly by Vocaloid voicebanks, we can see that the total number of songs and total number of songs excluding Hatsune Miku began to decrease in middle 2012. However, the number of Hatsune Miku songs remained rather stable throughout the years, suggesting an overall decrease in Vocaloid activity but a stability in Hatsune Miku-related activities.
While there were fluctuations in the first 5 years, from 2012 onwards, the number of views and number of comments on NicoNico steadily decreased, suggesting reducing fan activity in Vocaloid songs uploaded on this platform. The two abnormal dip in activity is ignored in this analysis as they coincide with times of natural disasters in Japan.
