#vesperbell

Issen - VESPERBELL

Since middle school, finding Japanese cover artists on YouTube has been my comfort way of finding music. Japanese cover artists on YouTube range from channels focused on music to VTubers and streamers. That being said, the audience that listens to these tends to be the same.

In general, covers are quite controversial. It is a dicey topic indeed. Should money the cover artist makes go to the original creator? If so, how much? The way I see it, as long as the original artist is credited, people doing covers on their songs gives greater exposure to the original artist than they would have if nobody made covers. As for the logistics of how earnings should be split, that is not what I'm here for.

Let's dive into various songs from different cover artists.

Self inflicted achromatic cover by Hanatan ~ Original by Hatsune Miku

One of the first covers I stumbled upon, and now nearly a decade later is still one of my favorite songs. The original of this song is sang by Hatsune Miku, a Vocaloid. For those not familiar, Vocaloids are synthesized voices. Not to be confused with AI, as this has been a thing since long before AI was.

Vocaloids are an entire other topic of their own, but one thing I can say for certain is that I definitely prefer an organic human voice to a computer's.

And from what I've found, cover artists tend to be different from pop artists and such. When I say this, I mean the difference is in their voice; their voices tend to have more emotion or energy. This particular song is a depressing one (a common theme in Vocaloid songs) and while she still captures the essence of the song in her voice, the artist (Hanatan) sings it in such a beautiful voice.

Marigold cover by Amatsuki ~ Original by Aimyon

Like many other cover artists, Amatsuki has gained much of his popularity through posting covers on sites like YouTube and Bilibili (Bilibili is a Japanese video streaming website, similar to YouTube). Making covers is often a good entryway into the music scene for Japanese artists online.

phony cover by Hoshimachi Suisei ~ Original by KAFU

Another popular thing in the Japanese cover scene is VTubers making covers or singing other songs on their streams. For context, a VTuber is just a streamer who uses an avatar instead of their own face. It is often a trend for a song to have a cover done on it by a bunch of different VTubers around the same time. Suisei in particular has a lot of her content focused around music. While she does have songs of her own (as does every artist I have chosen to put in this blog), doing these trendy songs as covers or just singing other popular songs on stream helps her grow as an artist and a content creator alike.

1,000,000 TIMES cover by VESPERBELL Yomi and Suzuna Nagihara ~ Original by My First Story

A great thing that I see way more on covers than on actual songs: duets. Adding another voice just gives more layering to the song, and makes the song hit so different when done like it was in this cover. It is also just a cool thing to see artists I like to listen to collaborating and actually doing a great job with it.

VESPERBELL 1st ALBUM「革命」XFD