How to listen old Vocaloid songs

You just come to Vocaloid/Miku for not too long? You want to know more about Vocaloid and Miku, espacially the history.

Then come read this post and I will introduce you 2 quick ways to get familiar with Vocaloid/Miku 🙂.

Prerequisites

Before we get started, let’s make sure you have access to the following site and services:

• Niconico
• Youtube

And also make sure you understand basic Japanese, or at least have a translator to read Japanese.

The Main Idea

Let’s first all understand that Hatsune Miku, or Vocaloid products, are basically a voice synthesizer. So Hatsune Miku “personally” does not make or own any songs. It is the Vocaloid Producers who bought Hatsune Miku as the product make her various Vocaloid songs.

Since the release of Hatsune Miku on August 31st 2007, many Vocaloid Producers have made many Vocaloid songs. Some of them are famous and become the symbol of Vocaloid in various eras.

So our idea is simply. Since it is those famous Vocaloid songs made the history of Vocaloid, we hope that by listening these famous Vocaloid songs in the chronological order. The important keyword here is chronological order. If we follow it, we should somehow get a feeling of how Vocaloid history goes.

Of course things can not be that simple by just listening songs. So if possible, try to search about the story behind a song on the internet. When you listen a song and you like it, then try to search about the Vocaloid Producer who made that song, or the wiki about that song. We hope that by searching these information, we can gather pieces of information and slowly build up the whole picture of Vocaloid history.

So now, the real question is, where can we find these famous Vocaloid songs? Well, there are 2 ways.

Way 1 - The Hall of Legend song list

Talking about a list of famous Vocaloid songs, Hall of Legend is the best candidate. It is a list of songs with 1,000,000 views on Niconico. Here is the list of Hall of Legend:

• VOCALOID伝説入りの一覧
• UTAU伝説入り
• CeVIO伝説入り

Similarly we have a YouTube version, but for ten million views: (because hitting 1 million in Youtube is too easy)

• YouTube上播放数量超过1000万的VOCALOID歌曲

Nice, we have the song list, but hold on, there are soooooooo many songs (800+ by the time of writing this post). We don’t have the effort to listen all of them, don’t we? So, we can prioritize the Hall of Legend song list based on various factors, and then based on your patient level, you (as a Miku fan) decide how many songs do you want to listen.

Prioritization

First, let’s draw a diagram like following:

The same table can be used for the YouTube list, but instead of 1M views, we use 10M views.

Now, our prioritization is very simply: we walks the table row by row, from left to right. In each cell, we find songs that satisfy the condition, and then we listen to them before moving on to the next cell. For example, the first cell is songs that released in 2007 and hit 1M views within 100 days.

Songs in the first row hit 1M views in the very short time (within 100 days). These songs have great impact in the Vocaloid history. Hence we should listen to them first before moving on to the next row. Some examples are メルト, 千本桜, 砂の惑星, 乙女解剖, and etc.

Songs in the second row hit 1M views within a year of time. A year of time tbh is still a short period. These songs, although are not as famous as the first row, usually becomes the symbol in that year. For example, magnet from 2009, 夕景イエスタデイ from 2013, 太陽系デスコ from 2017, まにまに from 2022, and etc.

For those who are inpatient, the first two rows together around 100~200 songs should be enough to give you a good shape of the Vocaloid history, but I still highly recommend you keep on going to the third row. Songs in the third row didn’t reach 1M views in a short time, but still, that is 1M views. Since this row contains a lot of songs (maybe around 300~500?), in this row, you will experience the wide diversity of Vocaloid music style, and see how different era in Vocaloid history have different style of Vocaloid songs. That’s why I still highly recommend you finish listening to songs in this row.

Upon here, you should have a clear understanding of Vocaloid history. If you are still interested in listening more, you can continue the last row, but it is optional.

Way 2 - Music Game

Just listening the Hall of Legend song list can be pretty tedious, even though we prioritize the list. So is there a more funnier way to listen Vocaloid songs? Fortunately, yes! Let’s play music games 😄!

The idea is that, if a song is included in a music game, then such song should be quite popular. So, by playing music games, you get the fun while get known to some popular Vocaloid songs. This is also my first method to get known to Vocaloid😊.

The first music game that any Miku fan must play (Yes, must play, I am serious) is:

• Official series of 初音ミク -Project DIVA-

But one is not enough, then choose at least one of the following music games to play:

• Fan-made Project Diva simulation like PPD or Project HeartBeat. Or fan-made chart/mod for official Project Diva games which can be found in the Project DIVA Modding 2nd Discord server.
• Project SEKAI
• OSU

Project Diva series

The best Vocaloid music game is Project Diva series with no doubt. This is an old series with a lot of title on PS series, Switch and PC. Here is the image of the Project Diva series.

Basically, Project Diva series has 2 lines: The normal title series of 1,2,ex,f1,f2,x and the arcade series like FT,MegaMix,etc.

Most people would recommend you just buy Project Diva MegaMix+ (make sure you buy the VIP version to get all songs) on PC to get all 250+ songs in one buy. It is a good decision in terms of the music game, but I wouldn’t recommend do as our priority is to get familiar with famous Vocaloid songs and the Vocaloid history, because in Project Diva MegaMix+, you can’t listen songs in chronological order of their release date. So, I would recommend you to play old titles instead.