koebu

» see koebu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The tagline was koe de asobu, playing with voices, and the site meant it literally. You recorded yourself reading a line, a poem, a song or a whole radio segment, uploaded the audio, and other members played it back and rated it. There was no video and no photo feed underneath any of it. The unit of the site was a recording of a person's voice, and everything else on the page existed to rank and route those recordings.

Kayac opened it on 12 December 2007. Kayac is the Kamakura studio with the deliberately odd corporate slogan about being a fun company, and koebu has that fingerprint all over it, down to a live voice-chat feature called koebu LIVE! that went in on 16 May 2008. The basic site was free. A paid tier called Gold Member cost 540 yen a month and unlocked the parts that needed storage or bandwidth.

What gave it a constituency was the voice-acting world. Japan has a professional seiyuu industry with a fan culture attached to it and an audition circuit that people seriously try to enter, and koebu became somewhere to practice in public and be heard. A newcomer audition tied to the Seiyu Awards ran on the site on 8 December 2008, a year after opening. The Asahi Shimbun wrote about it in an evening feature in February 2012 under a headline about making the Mona Lisa talk.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the numbers on the way out ~

Kayac sold koebu to CyberAgent on 30 September 2014, exactly two years before the closure date. CyberAgent set up a wholly owned subsidiary called koebu Inc to run it, said publicly that it expected synergy with its mobile game Girlfriend (Beta), which was built entirely around voiced characters, and then absorbed the subsidiary back into the parent by simplified merger in August 2015.

The end was announced on 9 February 2016. A week later the site was still reporting 947,287 registered users against 4,382,379 voice posts, with a cumulative play count of 133,041,950. Those are not the numbers of a failed product. They are the numbers of a product that had close to a million accounts and no way to convert audio hobbyists into revenue at a rate CyberAgent was interested in, which is a different problem and a more common one.

~ what it needed to exist ~

A voice community needs a shared body of scripted material that a lot of people want to perform, and Japan has one. Anime and game dialogue is written down, widely known, endlessly reinterpretable and attached to an industry that holds public auditions. Turkey in 2008 had none of that. Nobody here was going to record a monologue for strangers to score, and the closest equivalent was sending an audio file to one person over MSN, which is a file transfer rather than a community.

That is why the site stayed domestic through nine years and two owners without anybody trying to internationalize it. The thing it ran on does not export.

~ the funny part ~

On 1 April 2010 the front page became fuebu, a flute club instead of a voice club, and the joke was engineered rather than just announced. The swap only happened on your first visit of the session, so the page you landed on depended on whether you had opened your browser yet that day. Typing the site's own name into koebu LIVE! silently rewrote it to the fake one. The fuebu page stayed reachable at its own address long after the first of April, which is a level of commitment to a one-day gag that most companies do not get near.

~ what happens to the audio ~

The site ran on odai, prompts that members recorded answers to. On 28 September 2016, two days before the end, Kayac posted one more of them under the heading thank you for nine years, and asked people to send in what koebu had meant to them. Kayac had not owned the service for two years at that point. The replies came in anyway, a lot of them about what the site had done to someone's life, and the post is still up on the studio's own news page.

What did not survive is the archive. Nine years of amateur voice work, several million clips of people reading dialogue into a laptop microphone in their bedrooms, went off with the service on 30 September 2016. The domain has not answered on either protocol since.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »