In the past couple of years, VTubing has continued to grow as an inventive and influential form of entertainment. With major collaborations and sold-out concert halls slowly starting to crop up here in the U.S., hololive has been one of the spearheads of this rise in popularity. At Anime NYC, Anime News Network spoke to Motoaki Tanigo (YAGOO), CEO of COVER Corporation, the company behind the hololive production VTuber agency, and Max Sung Yoon Kim, the head of COVER USA Sales. They were accompanied by Moeko Tamano, the head of International Business Development, and Daniar Kisaragi, the international PR team community manager, who both provided translations for the interview. Tanigo and Max Kim offered insight into how they hope to expand their presence in the United States.

(interview’s a month old)

  • MHLoppy@fedia.ioOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    13 days ago

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but are there roughly 89 active hololive affiliated talents? How does COVER organize so many distinct individuals across many different subgroups?

    TANIGO: So we have around 65 talent managers who literally and figuratively speak their language. We have Japanese speakers, we have English speakers, and we also have Indonesian speakers. That being said, I still do not think that our support for our English talents is enough, so I hope to see more improvement in that area. Now that we have the United States covered with Max Kim as our Overseas Brand Partnership Director, we hope that we can offer more support to our English talents, and we’re looking into ways that we can best utilize this resource.

    So about a 2:3 ratio of managers to talents right now, which is interesting.

    Interview’s kinda short - only has a handful of questions, but at least the responses aren’t just one-liners.

  • Syrc@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    13 days ago

    It feels pretty weird to have such a polite/formal interview drop the word “normies” twice, but I guess it gets the point across so…

  • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    13 days ago

    always nice to see a little insight into how Holo operates. A bit surprised that Yagoo sees potential for improvement on the EN manager side but then again they have to stretch the managers there over pretty much every timezone so I guess it makes sense