NOTE: The following contains comments that are based on the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Vocaloidism or its staff.
“Roshin Yuukai,” literally “nuclear fusion”, but more commonly referred to by it’s English subtitle of “Meltdown,” has been taken off of Nico Nico Douga. To non-Japanese speakers like myself, this was a puzzling development, but as the details came in, it became more and more troubling. It’s been explained elsewhere on this blog, (actually, keep it in a separate tab/window; I’ll be referencing it often) so I’ll just jump right into the commentary.
No matter whether you think that taking the video down was a good idea or not, Iroha and friends are in the right. It’s their work; it’s only natural that they deserve a say in how it’s viewed or distributed. Essentially, it’s not that much different than internet piracy. You have a bunch of people trying to distribute content in an inappropriate manner, and the “Meltdown” staff, as creators and de facto owners of the song, have a right to try and control distribution as they see fit. You may not like it, but making everyone happy isn’t the goal here. If anything, I think Iroha and his or her cohorts should be lauded in trying to do things the “right way”. The MyList spamming did nothing but boost the song’s visibility, and others wouldn’t say “no” to free pub. Sure, it may be petty, but again, they have the control.
It’ll be interesting to see where things go from here. VocaRan 101 has the same scoring system as the past 80-some before it, so it looks like that won’t change. The two real unanswered questions are these:
1) Will other producers of artificially publicized videos take action?
2) Will the staff of “Meltdown” stop producing videos for Nico Nico Douga.
My initial inclination is that the answer to both is no. Only time will tell for the answer to #2, but for the first question, the initial numbers tend to agree with me. My fellow bloggers looked at the sea of downward arrows and conclude that there is an immediate impact (for the better, I’m sure). I think they are humbly mistaken, because they are looking at the wrong statistic. For my conclusion, I look at the points. Score is generally a better indication of traffic than a ordered ranking. If Song A has 300,000 points in a week, and Song B has 200,000 points, there’s a good chance that more people were watching/MyListing Song A than Song B. The same can be said for comparing one song’s score week-to-week. As stated the VocaRan article, when comparing this week’s scores to last week’s, there were songs that went up and songs that went down. Of the nine “regulars” still in the Top 30, 5 of them had changes of at least 6,000 points, but four of them were increases in score. That one was “Black★Rock Shooter”, who likely had a generous bump from MikuFES and the upcoming anime adaptation. Do you see a “Meltdown” effect from this? I don’t.
Maybe the fallout (pun somewhat intended) will take time to fully develop, or maybe this will just end up being an isolated incident that quickly vanishes from the collective conscious of NND. Whatever happens, this certainly is an unfortunate event that I do not want to be repeated.