Cover brings VTuber phenomenon to U.S. audiences

Cover Corp. has expanded outside of Japan, bringing virtual creators known as VTubers to U.S. audiences. The market is getting its test now as to whether VTubers — where humans give voice to 3D avatars in concert performances — can catch fire on the global stage.

And the big talent agency is hoping that the phenomenon that has taken off so well in Asia will go over well in places like Los Angeles, the entertainment capital. With VTubers, human entertainers deliver the voice and motion performance behind the scenes while 2D or 3D animated avatars appear on stage.

Tokyo-based Cover promotes and stages the “hololive production,” and this week it hosted a second solo concert show dubbed Grimoire by the English VTuber Mori Calliope at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. At the venue that accommodates around 4,000 people, Calliope performed songs for 90 minutes or so for the audience with a 3D-like effect. I included a video that captured some of Calliope’s vibe.

“Oh, man, it was everything I hoped that it would be in terms of show quality and and fan reactions,” said Calliope said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It was wonderful. I definitely pushed myself preparing for it. But it was definitely worth it for the amazing night that we were all able to create together.”

In July 2022, Mori Calliope held her first solo concert at Toyosu PIT in Japan. Grimoire was the first solo concert event held outside of Japan for hololive production talent. Cover’s Hololive Production is a VTuber management group that consists of the talent groups hololive and Holostars. Hololive production has over 80 affiliated talents active in Japan, Indonesia, and English-speaking countries, and it has over 80 million YouTube subscribers across the channels.

“I’m so happy and proud of my community for coming out to represent,” she said. “I really didn’t think I’d be here this long, and now it’s almost five years. It’s crazy to me where I can’t see the end of the road. I have gotten comfortable doing what I do. I love making music. I love creating stuff for my fans and for myself. I’m enjoying the ride.”

With Cover’s technology, hololive production talents provide various experiences ranging from game streams to offline concerts. They form a stable community that connects fans, creators, and talents all around the world via social networks.

Cover itself is a next-generation IT entertainment company with one of the world’s leading VTuber IPs and a large and passionate fan community. Its mission is “Together, Let’s Create Culture Loved by All.” Back in November, Cover established Cover USA in Los Angeles as a new branch for the management company for VTubers. It operates hololive production, home to the No. 1 subscribed VTubers from Japan, North America, and Southeast Asia.

A growing phenomenon

Hatsune Miku started taking off in Japan as early as 2007. And so the VTuber tradition in Japan has been going strong for a good 15 to 17 years.

Cover USA has started creating hololive concerts in the U.S. In July 2023, Cover previously held a hololive English concert at YouTube Theater in Los Angeles. Six thousand seats sold out in just 30 minutes, with 25 thousand online viewing tickets sold. And in August 2024, hololive English concert at Kings Theater in New York, six thousand seats sold out in just ten minutes.

As for the popularity of VTubing, Calliope credits the global popularity of anime. It’s also becoming more normal for people to see themselves as a character, or an alter ego behind a mask of anonymity. That might have something to do with the effect of living through the pandemic with an online life.

“People can look at you as a human being. Your age, things like that, don’t matter,” Calliope said. “People are are able to look past that. Everybody is on a similar playing field. We all are kind of anonymous to a degree, and it becomes a bit more about who you are rather than what you look like. It’s accentuated by your sense of humor, your creativity, the content that you’re creating, whether it be music or comedy sketches.”

People can get to know you more for your personality, and that becomes the highlight of who you are. It takes a lot of the stress out of performing.

“It really becomes truly about who you are on the inside,” she said. “I think there’s something really amazing and mysterious about what draws people into it. And while VTubing is mainstream in Japan at this point, I’m not 100% certain where it will go in places like America.”

Calliope noted that in Japan, at the Holofest show in Makuhari Messe (the near-Tokyo venue where the Tokyo Game Show takes place), there are thousands of people showing up. At that event, VTubers perform but they also chat or play games.

For shows, there can be 4,000 people watching concurrently, with as many as 20,000 people watching for collaborative events with a number of performers, Calliope said.

“If it’s all virtual and you’re watching on YouTube or streaming services in English, it can get to be around like anywhere from 36,000 to like 75,000 people watching at one time,” she said. “It really does vary depending upon the talent. For Japanese talent, though, I think 3D live shows can get anywhere between 170,000 or 150,000 people watching one time.”

Big ambitions

Motoaki Tanigo, CEO of Cover, said in an interview that Cover is planning to increase the number of live streamers focused on VTubing. They focus on music, streaming and casual conversations. When I asked Tanigo what made VTubing take off in Japan, I noted that CodeMiko (created by Youna Kang) was really one of the first VTubers that took off in the U.S., based on a hilarious comedy routine built around gaming.

Tanigo noted that two-dimensional anime idols were popular in Japan, where voice actors played rhythm games and broadcast it. These unscripted, captured performances set a precedent and made it easier for fans to embrace VTubers, he said.

“In the past, you became a fan of a character, and now with Vtubers you are becoming the fan of a person,” Tanigo said.

To help the industry take off, Tanigo collaborated with a baseball team, convenience stores and later TV channels. He also collaborated with real artists through short videos, and with people who appear as characters in video games. That helped raise awareness in Japan for VTubers.

Cover also collaborated with the Los Angeles Dodgers to hold the first-ever “hololive night” at Dodger Stadium on July 5, 2024. The event included a merchandise sale, trading card release, and live performance by hololive talents. It was a massive success, with thousands of fans purchasing Dodgers tickets for the first time. The line for collaboration merchandise wrapped around the stadium and went on even after the end of the game. User-generated content from the event generated over 1.5 million views.

“I want to do this in the U.S. too,” he said. “We have YouTube as a the main platform but we are expecting to do more collaboration with several brands and media like we have with the Dodgers. Generation Z has been very supportive of VTubers.”

How it works

Cover uses a technology for capturing the movement of muscles and facial tracking to control the avatars during a livestream. The avatar’s eyes and mouth movements are synced with the real person’s movements. At first, the company used this tech for use in real-time multiplayer games.

Tanigo felt that people inside the world of VTubing were fascinating and he saw the leap in popularity thanks to COVID-19. That was when it started to make sense to broadcast artificial people on a screen to millions of people.

Cover is constantly developing new technology to make the work smoother and easier. Calliope notes that Cover owns the IP and they gave it to her as an avatar to represent her.

“They are here to help us out with basically opening up shop for ourselves, the business of being ourselves,” Calliope said. “Some of us do music, various kinds of entertainment, and singing. We play games, all kinds of creative stuff, and they offer their facilities to us. We’ve got a fantastic 3D studio that we have access to. It also has rooms for streaming and creating other content, lots of audio recording booths for creating music and Cover is here to support us in everything that we do.”

It provides managers and staff who make sure that everything goes well. And it helps plan the creative works like concerts or group singing events.

“It’s a fantastic talent agency,” Calliope said.

She noted that doing live shows as a virtual artist is more difficult to do because of the technology involved.

“For example, at the concert yesterday, I can’t even count how many people were backstage trying to work with with me and the technology and and everything that goes into broadcasting the concert that I was doing,” she said. “Because of that, it’s extremely expensive. So doing these kinds of live shows are few and far between. I’ve only done one other solo concert before this. That’s not to say I haven’t performed in front of many crowds like this before.”

Investing in the U.S.

Cover wants to spread VTubing across cultures in the U.S. and other places.

In addition to increasing its North American events, Cover is tapping into Western culture by putting out covers of English language songs. On October 30, VTuber Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame released a cover of The Beatles’ timeless song “Blackbird.” This rendition brings a refreshing, modern interpretation that’s sure to charm both longtime fans and new listeners. Bloodflame currently has over 400,000 subscribers on YouTube.

And on December 14, 2024, the VTuber Awards, an award show celebrating VTubing culture and community worldwide, held its event at the WePlay Esports Arena Los Angeles. It was streamed on Filian’s official Twitch and YouTube channels. More than 90,523 people joined the livestream at its peak and a collective 352,035 hours wer watched. The VTuber Awards was founded in 2023 by Filian, together with Mythic Talent and WePlay Studios.

Among the winners were Best Just Chatting “Zatsudan” VTuber: Ceres Fauna; Best Art VTuber: Raora Panthera; Best FPS VTuber: Dokibird; Best RP/ASMR VTuber: Ceres Fauna; Best Music VTuber: Suisei Hoshimachi; Best Tech VTuber: Vedal987; Funniest VTuber: Chibidoki; Most Chaotic VTuber: Gigi Murin; Hidden Gem: LongLiveReya; Rising Star: Arielle and more. Those names aren’t commonly known now, but perhaps one day they might be household names and celebrities.

Echoing its approach in Japan, Cover started a collaboration with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2024, and Cover will collaborate with Twitch as well. The U.S. market is so much bigger and fragmented that it’s harder to do deals that cover the entire country. But there are a lot of streamers in the U.S. who don’t use their own faces while streaming, and the audience has still embraced them.

“We have to find those business partners,” he said. And he thinks VTubers are more accepted in the anime fan community than in other communities. As that grows in the U.S., so can the market for VTubers. Cover has scores of VTubers as talent, and about a third of them are in the U.S. It has some of the most popular talent, such as Gawr Gura, who has millions of subscribers. Some of them are focused on VR market, while others are in other gaming markets.

Besides Japan and the U.S., Calliope sees VTubing rising in South Korea, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia.

She said, “Back there in the darkness, performing for everybody is something that i an experience. It’s scary, it’s overwhelming, but so rewarding.”

Calliope has been doing it for almost five years, and that made her one of the first English-speaking artists to do VTubing.

At the start, she said, “It was crazy. It was definitely different. We were all in the trenches back then. You know, VTubing had been around for a while in Japan, and there were still some English speaking VTubers, but it hadn’t blown up into a phenomena or anything that anybody outside of the anime community would know even a little bit about.”

After the debut of the English artists, the growth was steady. Cover was a relatively small company, and there weren’t as many rules in place.

“We had to figure things out ourselves. The support was also not 100% there back in the day as it is now. They didn’t really have the capacity to handle the waves that we were making on the internet. There was a lot of trial and error,” Calliope said. “I try to use the experience that we gained from back then to help the new people out as much as I can.”

Will AI matter?

Since she was talking to me through her alter ego, I had to ask Calliope if she was a real person and not an AI.

Calliope replied, “This is something that we hear all the time. I’m not AI. I am a real person. But for virtual artists, I’m not saying that AI YouTubers can’t exist. I think there are very few of them. I think the technology isn’t there yet. But for the majority of us, we are real people. The only difference is we just look like this. We just use this form to communicate with people, and that’s it.”

So far, there haven’t been any obvious AI performers. Some view Hatsune Miku as an AI, but her music is made by different human producers. The idea of AI creating music and becoming VTubers is “definitely scar for people like me who are making music,” Calliope said.

But she thinks it will be a while before we see truly great AI entertainers.

As for AI VTubers, where the talent is AI and not human, Tanigo said there isn’t much yet but it will likely become popular in the future. And Tanigo thinks the tech for VTubing is easier to access than in the past.

“Anyone can get into VTubing,” he said.

Calliope hopes VTubing is a forerunner of the metaverse, where sometime in the future more people, beyond entertainers, can take on this kind of anonymity and allow their personalities to shine, she said.

“I love envisioning a world like that for now,” Calliope said.

As for Calliope herself, she said, “I’m a really low key person. I prefer to hide in the shadows. That is always how I have been. Doing things like performing and seeing for the world were always dreams that I had wanted. But as such a shy person and somebody who prefers to be in the shadows and not be seen, especially these days, I feel like it’s just the perfect job for me. And I love the idea that no matter how old I get, I will always be like this and I will always be able to just continue making music comfortably.”

For the future Calliope would like to see more virtual talent hit the charts.

“There’s a bit of a stigma against virtual artists. We’re not fully accepted yet. We just got to keep trying to push past the barrier and show everybody,” she said. “It’s about how you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.”