The second the announcement went live, all ten of the pop stars shared it on their own feeds.
It was a perfectly timed drop to get the word out as fast as possible. At the exact same time, Nick and his team opened up the crowdfunding page and the voting portal right inside their official website and the smart assistant's app store.
Every single registered user got exactly one vote, and each ballot cost five bucks. The rules were simple: as soon as any of the ten celebrities hit the ten-million-dollar funding mark, their exclusive voice pack would be officially unlocked for development.
For the hardcore fanbases, this was the ultimate rallying cry. The entertainment industry is a total meat grinder, especially for these young pop idols, and the rivalry between different fandoms can get incredibly intense.
Fans care deeply about leaderboards and anything that proves their favorite star is the biggest deal in the country. Because of that, the second the voting went live, millions of fans completely swarmed the platform.
Five dollars a vote is basically pocket change for most people these days, especially for the younger Gen Z crowd. But Nick and Tyler had built a massive hurdle right into the system: you had to be a verified, registered owner of the actual hardware to cast a ballot.
A registered user meant you actually bought the product and linked your account. If you were just a casual fan who hadn't bought the smart voice assistant yet, the system completely locked you out.
This instantly threw a ton of fandoms into a massive panic, and they started frantically begging people all over social media to use their registered accounts to vote for their favorite stars.
It turned into a real-world stress test to see which of these young celebrities actually had genuine mass appeal. For example, one of the top female pop stars on the list, famous for her sweet personality and amazing vocals, had an incredibly loyal army of fans.
She was one of the headliners for this initial rollout, and her community mobilized the absolute second the leaderboard went online.
In just under two hours, her specific campaign cleared over five million dollars, putting her miles ahead of everyone else on the board.
Even the celebrity sitting dead last was pulling in crazy numbers, raking in over a million dollars in those same two hours, even though his fans were actually complaining that the number was way too low for his usual hype.
The whole thing was completely unhinged.
It didn't just catch Nick and Tyler off guard; the tech blogs, mainstream media outlets, and the entire entertainment industry were staring at the live tickers with their jaws on the floor as the money piled up.
And these were real, verified micro-transactions. Every single account attached to a vote belonged to a real-world customer, which completely eliminated the possibility of management companies using paid bot farms to inflate the numbers.
The media was losing its mind, simultaneously hyping up the terrifying spending power of these fandoms and marveling at how fast Nick's company was printing cash. If the charts kept moving at this velocity, all ten celebrities were going to smash past the ten-million-dollar finish line.
Ten million a piece meant a cool one hundred million dollars upfront just for the initial crowdfunding phase. And that was just the buy-in; once the engineering team actually shipped the final voice packs to the public, the recurring revenue was going to be astronomical.
On top of that, according to the official terms Militech Technology put out, these custom voice profiles weren't a one-time purchase; they were tied to a monthly subscription model.
What that meant in plain English was that as long as a celebrity stayed relevant, the cash would just keep flowing into the company's bank accounts month after month. Since this was only the first wave of ten stars, the more talent they onboarded down the road, the higher their baseline revenue would scale.
This was exactly why the talent agencies had scrambled to sign the paperwork in the first place. Even a modest twenty or thirty percent cut of the pie added up to a fortune when you dropped it against a massive, highly engaged user base. Plus, a steady stream of recurring passive income is infinitely more lucrative than a single, one-off commercial endorsement deal.
Because of the massive stakes, the management companies and the idols themselves went completely all-out promoting the campaign, turning it into the number-one trending topic on the internet.
Within hours, the vote became the biggest talking point across social media and evening news broadcasts.
Of course, everything is a double-edged sword, and the internet quickly split into two incredibly loud camps of supporters and haters tearing into each other online.
The people cheering for the celebrity voice packs were mostly younger users and the massive fan communities who were thrilled about the new feature.
For them, being able to hear their favorite idol talking to them throughout the day for the price of a cheap cup of coffee was an awesome upgrade.
To most fans, these massive stars always feel incredibly distant and untouchable. You never get to actually interact with them in real life, so you're usually stuck just buying their albums and supporting them from afar.
But this new software feature let them bring their favorite celebrity right into their daily routines, making them a personal, interactive part of their lives and making the day-to-day grind a lot more fun.
The critics on the other side of the fence, however, had a massive list of grievances to complain about.
First, they immediately started bashing Nick and his team, calling them greedy corporate sharks who were shamelessly exploiting impressionable kids for a quick buck. When a company pulls in that much cash that fast, people naturally get incredibly jealous, which led to a ton of bitter rants and venting in the comment sections.
Next, the high-brow crowd attacked the company for pandering to cheap pop culture. They argued that if Militech was going to release voice packs, they should be highlighting legendary actors, professional voice artists, or historical figures who actually had a positive impact on society, instead of a bunch of pretty boy lip-syncers and squeaky pop stars polluting everyone's ears.
On top of that, a wave of self-proclaimed tech experts and talking heads started warning the public that these hyper-realistic voice profiles were inherently dangerous and could trigger massive identity theft issues. They started publicly calling on federal regulators to step in and clamp down on the technology before these highly simulated voices got out of hand.
But outside of the fans and the critics, there was a third group of people making noise, mostly made up of existing customers or fans of other celebrities who felt left out of the party.
These users were flooding Nick's support channels to complain while simultaneously demanding that the company build custom voice packs for their own favorite icons and fictional characters.
For instance, a bunch of people were begging for the voice of a famous old-school stand-up comedian, others wanted a gritty middle-aged movie star whose career had cooled down, and some were asking for iconic rock singers. There was even a massive wave of requests for classic characters from anime, blockbusters, and popular TV shows.
The wish lists were completely all over the place, crossing every imaginable boundary of age, gender, genre, and even species.
In fact, a massive group of users hijacked the company's official blog and Nick's personal Twitter feed, leaving thousands of comments demanding a cat voice pack that just meowed and purred at them.
Nick could only laugh as the whole situation blew up into an absolute internet phenomenon, and it wasn't long before potential partners started knocking on the office doors looking to cut a deal.
The first wave of people trying to get a meeting were talent managers and booking agents from across the entertainment industry. Their goal was incredibly straightforward: they wanted to partner with Nick's firm to launch custom voice packs for their own stables of talent. For them, it wasn't just about the massive financial windfall; it was a proven way to keep their clients trending in the cultural zeitgeist.
The second group looking to collaborate consisted of serious businesses and public organizations that saw the massive utility behind the simulated voice engine.
For example, the team over at National Public Radio reached out about a joint venture to develop a custom, highly polished simulated voice profile to read out automated news broadcasts and daily audio articles.
Right on their heels, the regional high-speed rail authority reached out with a very similar proposal, asking Nick's team to build a clean, authoritative simulated voice pack to handle all the automated station announcements and train schedules across the transit grid.