Clarification on SeeU’s Status and explaining Yamaha’s roles in 3rd-Party Development & Distribution for VOCALOID

Model by Mamama Pose by Snorlaxin

SeeU has been the subject of a lot of talk lately due to ST Media’s upcoming repackage and final sale as I’ve been doing my best to cover. However, it seems a lot of misinformation and confusion has arisen among English-speaking users once again. To help clear up some of this confusion, I’ll be explaining SeeU’s current roadmap, Yamaha’s role when it comes to third-party VOCALOID development and distribution, and even bring up another case of confusion and misinformation which occurred over the last few years. I hope to break things down in a digestible manner.

So what’s happening with SeeU?

For those who don’t know, I’ve been following SeeU’s status for the last few years keeping tabs on her availability. The last time she had gone out of stock was back in May of 2022 with no signs of restocking. This led many including myself to believe she had finally been discontinued. Back on September 22nd, 2023, ST Media held a live stream talking about the future and discussed the status of SeeU.

As previously covered, ST Media disclosed that they were never able to fully purchase rights to SeeU from SBS Artech and while individuals from both companies have expressed interest in new developments, it was ultimately decided out of respect that no further developments for SeeU would be made with only licensed merchandise from companies like Starlike to be made and distributed.

Regarding restocking SeeU’s voicebank however, ST Media and SBS Artech were able to locate 400 serial codes, originally bound for sale in China and come to an agreement to do one final sale. ST Media has been actively working on a special repackage and merchandise to sell through a crowdfunding campaign as a way to commemorate the final sale. While many details are still unknown, we’ve been covering the story as more information comes to light.

Unfortunately this does mean that once all 400 copies are sold, SeeU will be permanently discontinued as SBS does not seem to be interested in purchasing new generated stock.

So how does Yamaha fit into this decision and what is their role?

To put it in a few words, Yamaha DOES NOT have any influence over the decision. At most, when a company needs to generate new serial codes for their Vocaloid product, they need to reach out to Yamaha and pay a fee to generate new serial codes for the product in question. While the fee is unknown, we do know that Yamaha is willing to generate codes for even software that is no longer officially supported.

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If we look into our current Vocaloid list, we can see that both VOCALOID(1) and VOCALOID2 products are still stocked and sold to this day. This means that as long as a fee for new stock is paid, the codes will still be generated and this does not seem to be limited to any companies. Ultimately that leaves the third-party company to decide whether or not to discontinue a product.

So why are people blaming Yamaha?

While I can’t give an exact reason, I can explain a few things. First there has been a strong bias against Yamaha and the Vocaloid engine in the English-speaking community for the last few years, so users are quick to put the blame on the corporation. Secondly there is a huge amount of information that is not provided in English. Being that Vocaloid supports up to 5 languages currently, there is a lot of information that is in languages that requires a translation. Because of this language barrier, it is common for users to use machine translation which can result in errors.

This of course doesn’t mean Yamaha doesn’t make questionable choices or inadvertently upset fans. There are many reasons for a user to dislike a certain company, though us as fans should make sure we look further into certain situations before making conclusions.

Has Yamaha been blamed before?

The answer is of course yes, and I have a good and fairly recent example of Yamaha not being involved in a certain decision. While not a similar situation, it is a great example of how a piece of incorrect information can be believed as truth for years.

For years, it was thought that exclusivity clauses mentioned across a handful of Vocaloid companies pertaining to voice providers was a requirement by Yamaha. We only recently learned this was false within the last few years with the now famous case of Stardust.

Before diving into the situation, I must explain what the voice providers exclusivity clause is first. In the contracts for voice providers when they are signing on to voice a Vocaloid, there is a clause that prevents the voice provider to voice either another vocal synth character or on another engine that isn’t Vocaloid (this one seems to be the most prevalent version of the clause across several engines). The clause may include a set date of expiration or not have one at all and can vary in terms. The clause can on occasion be negotiable as well. Knowing this, we can now delve into Stardust’s case.

For those who don’t know, before Stardust Infinity was released, Quadimension had announced plans to bring her to SynthesizerV as far back as 2019, however, it was eventually revealed that there were complications with Chalili’s (Stardust’s voice provider) contract which led to Stardust’s SynthV bank to be delayed.

For some time, many users believed this contract was with Yamaha but the contract in question was actually with Vsinger’s Shanghai Henian who was commissioned by Quadimension to develop Stardust’s original Vocaloid 4 bank. On August 13th, 2021, former CEO of Quadimension, Ddickky posted the contract with SHN to Bilibili, explaining that they were in the process of negotiations and on August 25th announced that Stardust’s new bank was finally in production, confirming negotiations were successful.

This case proved to users that the exclusivity clauses weren’t necessarily done by Yamaha but were done by the respective developing company.

So what does Yamaha do when it comes to third-party development?

While not much is known, we do know a few obvious points. Of course, the first thing is to create the business contract with third-parties so after initial fees are paid they can provide the company with the necessary development tools and resources. Aside from that, Yamaha will also provide support to the developers and when the developers are finished with the bank, they’ll send the data to Yamaha for final approval. If approved, Yamaha will compress it into the final database and the distribution progress can begin.

As we now know with distribution, Yamaha’s role is generating serial codes when fees are paid however, they may also distribute the vocal on their own stores. Despite being able to act as a distributor though, some companies such as Zero-G, may not want to sell their vocals through Yamaha. This would typically be discussed during the contract-making process.

This is all we currently know about Yamaha’s role but it helps give us a bit more perspective.

Conclusion

As we’ve now covered, Yamaha’s role in terms of third-party development and distribution is a little more lax than we like to put it and it ultimately sucks that SeeU is discontinuing. But with everything covered in mind, we know to look a little more into these topics and make less assumptions.