Miku is not human. She is a virtual idol, a holographic star. Miku is crowdsourced, ever-evolving, famous software. Not even her fans know, or care, how to taxonomize her. ("She's rather more like a goddess: She has human parts, but she transcends human limitations. She's the great posthuman pop star," one fansite reads.)

Her bandmates are all actual people playing real instruments, but Miku is projected onto the stage, singing, if that's the word, in avian-robot trills. She was programmed to do this months before, thousands of miles away.

Not that her forecoded unreality interferes with widespread adoration. On the contrary, Miku is now one of the biggest acts in Asia-as popular in her native Japan as Sega's iconic Sonic the Hedgehog. She has devotees beyond Japan too. Last November she gave a concert in Singapore, drawing 3,000 fans-only about half of them female, not all young. They sang along in Japanese, a language many of them didn't speak. Some came dressed as Miku.