Even with the special character license, Crypton has found a way to profit from Vocaloid beyond software sales. Miku and subsequent Vocaloid characters appear on all sorts of merchandise and in ads for the likes of Toyota, a karaoke chain, and, most recently, convenience store Family Mart, which celebrated five years of Miku by swamping their stores with her visage for one month.

The Piapro License might give users free reign to modify Crypton's Vocaloids, but Leavitt says that for commercial uses "creators work with Crypton to collaborate on a project that benefits each other financially." The policy has worked out well on the music side: Vocaloid compilation CDs have reached the No. 1 spot on Japan's Oricon music charts while new releases from Vocaloid-utilizing artists like Supercell and Livetune (both among the earliest to use the software in music) get prime record-store billing alongside, say, Mumford And Sons' latest disc. Earlier this year, Livetune's hyperspeed, Miku-fronted song "Tell Your World" appeared in an ad for Google Chrome. The exposure shot the song to the top of the Japanese iTunes charts.

The minute-long ad (above) also does a great job highlighting the appeal of Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid culture by showing people putting their own take on Miku musically or visually (and using by Google properties, of course). This aspect of Vocaloid is just as important to its rise as anything else.

"More than the music itself, I really like how it's spread," says Vocaloid music-maker mus.hiba. "Once a song becomes famous, people start uploading videos of themselves singing it. Some of those videos become more popular than the original."

The Tokyo-based producer, who doesn't want his real name published, exists in the heart of the Vocaloid community, among artists whose works don't appear in music shops or convenience stores. These creators post original works online and collaborate with other Vocaloid fans entirely through the Internet; mus.hiba says he's met other artists over Twitter, and he's taken artwork from the Piapro social site. This side of Vocaloid matches up closer with the world of doujin: Amateurs sharing and working together to make original art based on an existing character.

They also have get-togethers, like the Miku birthday. That event is officially called "The Voc@loid M@ster" and the four-times-a-year meeting is the biggest Vocaloid convention in Japan. The gathering shows off the wide range of musical styles in the scene. In one room, artists sell self-funded CDs with genres ranging from hyperactive pop to Vocaloid-fronted death metal. On the dance floor in August, in front of fan-made videos featuring Vocaloid characters (most from Nico Nico Douga), DJs followed chugging rock songs with Vocaloid techno. One guy transformed the Hatsune Miku Family Mart ad jingle for a chirpy pop number. The crowd went wild.