Past Collaborations With VOCALOID SeeU - Why?

After the rebrand from VOCALOID CHINA to VOCANESE in 2013, Shanghai Henian created a new account for VOCANESE promotions. Something you’ll notice just by scrolling back through VOCANESE’s posts on Weibo is that Yanhe and Tianyi very frequently collaborated with SeeU around this time, the Korean VOCALOID3 developed by SBS A&T.

This relationship with SeeU wasn’t as simple as just having the three of them in the same place on occasion. Though she briefly made cameos back when it was still called VOCALOID CHINA PROJECT, from 2013 to 2014, SeeU appeared at many events with Yanhe and Tianyi, often more than the supporting VSINGER characters. SeeU even had a dedicated section on the VOCANESE app (long defunct).

The Korean producer Dr. Yun, who assisted in SeeU’s development, also created Yanhe’s demo song, 梦之雨 / Rain of Dreams, and created a Chinese version of his first album for Tianyi (originally in Korean, featuring SeeU). Not only this, but Yanhe’s first ever concert appearance was AT a SeeU concert! Shanghai Henian even held a contest to determine the two songs Yanhe would sing at this concert, asking for original song submissions from fans— with the grand prize for the winners being fully paid flights to Korea to watch Yanhe perform the songs live.

So… Why was this a thing, exactly?

As it turns out, it has to do with the former CEO of Shanghai Henian, Ren Li. Ren Li was a former employee at YAMAHA in the VOCALOID department before becoming CEO at Shanghai Henian, and still had connections to other people in the business (at the very least, Dr. Yun was one of these people). So, using these connections, he began cross promotion of VOCANESE characters with SeeU while the head of Shanghai Henian, both in China and South Korea.

Around 2015, Ren Li resigned from his position as CEO and began another company, Shanghai Wangcheng Information Technologies— most known for distributing VOCALOID Xin Hua in Mainland China. At this point, Xin Hua began to have collaborations with SeeU, while VOCANESE (now turned VSINGER) no longer mentioned SeeU after the change in staffing. Later on, Dr. Yun would write a demo song for Yuecheng, a private voicebank from Wangcheng.

While it’s a near zero chance that SeeU and Tianyi/Yanhe will ever collaborate again, it was a sweet moment of solidarity between the two different audiences for the respective VOCALOID. In fact, the fan concert 미친덕의 비공식 B급 묻지마 야매 시유콘서트 / Crazy Fans Unofficial B-level Don’t Ask Homemade SeeU Concert featured Tianyi as a guest singer in 2013. This would be Tianyi’s first ever live appearance, but because it was a fan organized event, Shanghai Henian would consider other events Tianyi’s first appearances.