The Evanescent English Hatsune Miku Website

Ever since its introduction back in late 2010, the English version of the Hatsune Miku product page on Crypton Future Media’s website had remained largely unchanged, even as recently as February 16 of this year. However, by March 9, Crypton had updated the page with fully rewritten text, including a lengthy section detailing how people involved in various types of business could “benefit from an exciting collaboration with Hatsune Miku and unleash new possibilities for [their] business.” The section showed off Miku’s music business prowess to potentially interested “musicians and label managers”, her sold-out live performances to potentially interested “concert and event promoters” and her merchandising draw to potential “brand marketers”. In the musicians section, the page stated that the people at Crypton are “proud to announce that Hatsune Miku ? English Version is to be released in summer 2013, and [they] are also planning collaborations with popular labels and artists. Finally, the bottom of the page held information about the Miku panel to be held at SXSW2013. Strangely, by March 11, the page had been shortened, removing all of the text trying to advertise Miku to potential business partners, and consequently the projected release time frame. Even the panel details had been deleted before the panel had started. It is not clear why Crypton removed a large chunk of that page. Perhaps this additional content was meant for a flyer and not for general public consumption, or perhaps it could’ve been that the summer 2013 release projection or the rest of the content was not sufficiently vetted. Since the March 9 version of the website has been taken down, statements made on that version of the page should not be construed as being current statements being made by Crypton, although we have managed to save both before and after screenshots of the webpage in question for archival reference purposes.