VTubers can be quite musical, with a huge community of musicians singing from the bottom of their hearts and creating amazing melodies. However, there is a price associated with all this — one Finana Ryugu from NIJISANJI opened using her experience.
The VTubing community is full of talented musicians who use their vocal cords and mixing skills to create great beats.
However, all this work has its price. Creating a single song involves a lot of moving parts. The easiest thing is to sing and add instrumental parts. But there is also producing and mixing to improve the sound for the release. If it’s recorded in person, there are studio expenses. There are also lyricists who can share their songwriting skills, and if you want a music video, you’ll need animators and artists.
This cost can increase quickly, so how much does a song cost on VTuber? Well, NIJISANJI star Finana Ryugu shared it live, and it can reach thousands — regardless of whether it’s a cover or an original work.
She started by explaining the process of creating a cover version, which is not so easy if you are a representative of the VTuber agency.
“I actually wanted to start with an original song,” she explained. “I really wanted to cover songs, but I was still new to everything, so I felt like I needed to learn a little more about these things and what I could do.
“The whole process of planning to create a cover is not as easy as you think, especially if you are associated with a corporation [agency]. You have to check permissions and stuff, just to make sure you’re not being infringed on [copyrights] or something like that.”
Then she talked about the cost and all the individual parts: “Each cover will probably cost about $1,000, [and] depending on how complex the music video is and more illustrations may be needed, it could be higher.
“I think the last music order I made was about $6,000.”
Of course, this cost does not apply to all VTuber musicians. Some do everything themselves — from mixing to any vocal work and even create some visual effects for this. However, the more you have to outsource, the more you will have to pay.
The difficulties of each of them are different animals, which also need to be dealt with. Although the covers already exist, there is still a lot of work to do to make them your own. However, this pales in comparison to the original songs.
“Making a cover of a song is much easier because sometimes you may or may not have some assets to know how to sing a song perfectly. You are also familiar, you can choose the song that you like.
“When you make the original, you don’t know how it’s going to sound at the end, so you have to challenge yourself to really understand how it’s going to sound. Usually the composer would give you a demo.
“Tsunami was very good for me until there were a couple of parts that were a bit complicated because I had never sung songs that used these vocal techniques. I really needed to try something different. At first I wanted to do an original song because I really wanted to succeed, and I had to work with one of my favorite authors [KIRA], who I’ve been a fan of for a very long time.”
If you are planning to make music as a VTuber, it will be easy for you to start with a few karaoke streams or acoustic clips on Twitter. But if you want a full-fledged production, be ready to fork out.
