Bringing Hololive to the U.S.: An Interview With Motoaki Tanigo, CEO of COVER Corp

ANN’s coverage of Anime NYC 2024 sponsored by Yen Press and Ize Press!

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. With a new U.S. branch now established, how does hololive plan to reach an even wider audience?

First off, congratulations to hololive Presents LIVE Concert with STAGE World Tour ’24 -Soar!-., for officially making their first tour stop here at Anime NYC! How long did it take COVER to plan this tour?

Motoaki TANIGO: So it was decided six months ago that we wanted to have more active concerts. Part of that plan was the world tour and the one here in NYC as well.

It looks like only Hakos Baelz will be making a return to this tour from the Dreamhack Melbourne concert. How does COVER decide which talents will be a part of each concert and tour? How do you decide who gets paired with who among the separate branches?

TANIGO: So this concert is our concert. For Dreamhack Melbourne, it was an invitation to perform from Melbourne City, so it’s a little bit different. We had Hakos Baelz in Melbourne because she’s Australian and we wanted talents that are pretty close to Australia to perform there, which is how we chose everyone else for Dreamhack. We picked up that our talent’s biggest passion is singing so we choose and pair our talents based on that passion. For World Tour, we have three talents from hololive English because we want to appeal more to the English market but we also want to have presentations from every other branch. We have two from Indonesia and two from Japan.

How are World Tour and Breaking Dimensions distinct from one another? Does it just boil down to the talents, or is it more about the themes?

TANIGO: World Tour is hololive appealing more to the English market, while Breaking Dimension is specifically for hololive English. The latter is a special program we want to have. It’s like this kind of Japanese-style concert that we’re bringing to America. World Tour is a more simple concert because we are at this convention, and we’re going to perform on the stage inside this venue. So the scale is a little bit smaller than Breaking Dimension.

Was there anything about the preparation for Breaking Dimensions that was noticeably different compared to last year?

TANIGO: So the venue for this year is very different from last year, especially since it was really hard to find the best place to have this kind of concert in New York. What’s interesting is that last year in LA, the idea was, “Hey, what is a VTuber?” We felt like it was kind of hard to get people to understand what a VTuber concert is, and for this year in New York, it’s pretty hard to find a place that can accommodate that idea, so that was challenging. Since this year’s venue is smaller than last year’s, we decided to have a two-day concert to accommodate more fans.

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.

It’s amazing how much has changed in just this year alone. Between the global tours, the meetups, and the concerts, VTubers are becoming far more regular throughout the United States and the world. Did you ever expect VTubing to become such a global entertainment phenomenon the way that it has?

TANIGO: So VTubers is really big in Japan, with Asia as the next biggest market. Our market in North America is not as big as Asia right now. So, I really want to make this clear. We are planning to get more into the North American market, which is why we are holding these concerts. We’re trying to gain more attention and more markets by utilizing our talents more in the U.S. Right now, we don’t really collaborate with North American companies as we do in Japan. Over there, we collaborate more with convenience stores, restaurants, and games. So we hope to have more of those kinds of collaborations here in the future. But it’s not just about a concert or one-off events. Kind of like streaming, we want to have regular, day-to-day interactions with people and form stronger connections.

Well, I never thought I’d see the day that VTubers would be represented at an American baseball game! For example, that event earlier in the summer at Dodgers Stadium. Can we expect the talents to do more reality-based content like that here in the U.S.?

TANIGO: First, thank you for acknowledging that because we’re really happy! Until now, we have always had this kind of presence at conventions, but to grab the hearts of the normies, the hearts of people who are not into Japanese pop culture, we started with the Dodgers. That was our first step into doing that. We actually had really cool comments from the Dodgers. The Dodgers helped us reach out to a different audience we hadn’t reached before, but at the same time, the Dodgers also reached a different audience. At the hololive night, they had a historic record and had people coming to the stadium for the first time. I don’t think I can give you an exact number, but it was pretty high. They also had the longest lines for the limited edition t-shirts and caps. So, it would be great for us to reach out to a different audience, but at the same time, it would also be great for our partners to attract a new audience in our already wonderful fan base!

So, a mutually beneficial relationship?

TANIGO: Exactly! At the same time, we had the Tsujita collaboration, which is a pretty famous ramen shop. With those collaborations, we’re beginning our first step into the American market, and we hope to collaborate more in the future. This is what we’re really hoping for. For example, I also hope we can collaborate more with games because games can reach every age [group], you know? They’re not just for older people or younger people. Games cater to everyone. Also, Max has so much experience in the game industry, so we really hope it will be our first step into collaborating with games in the U.S.

MAX KIM: This kind of goes hand in hand, but when VTubers and hololive were growing in Japan, we also had a lot of those kinds of collaborations. Not just the convenience stores and whatnot, but we also did the Pacific League, a major baseball league in Japan. We had two talents per team representing. We had dedicated merchandise, and we had a whole hour at night when YAGOO went and threw the first pitch. So this collaboration with the more normie-esque events is actually something that really helped us grow in Japan when we were in the early growing phases. We didn’t just grow to the streaming, gaming, or anime fandom. We also appealed to more general audiences.

I think we can try to replicate this in the U.S. as well. Of course, we’ll still do these kinds of concerts. We’ll still do anime conventions and events geared towards our anime and streaming fans at the same time. But we also want to be able to take measures and reach out to more major audiences to increase our presence. So that’s something that we try to replicate.

Final question: taking a step away from the corporateness of it all, do you have any advice for indie VTubers who might want to work in a major agency like hololive?

TANIGO:Keep doing what you like and do what you do best because that will make a brand for yourself. Instead of doing what people do to succeed, make your own path to succeed and make your own brand to reach the kind of audience that you want!

AJ also streams regularly on Twitch as the indie Vtuber Bolts The Mechanic where they talk about and play retro media!