Chapter 40
As the rounds progressed, the impact of Singerstar Season 5 only continued to grow.
Seo Siyeon, Blooming, and Joo Jinwoo kept creating one buzzworthy stage after another, holding the ratings above 30 percent.
Naturally, it was only to be expected that songs from a hit audition program would occupy the top spots on the charts!
This round, two songs—Seo Siyeon’s “Christmas of the day” and “Plum Blossoms”—rose to the top of the charts.
[Real-Time Watermelon Chart]
1. Christmas of the day - Seo Siyeon
2. Plum Blossoms - An Hanam
3. dislike - staright
4. Starry Night - Seo Siyeon
5.glassy sky - Blooming, Seo Siyeon
Three of the top five songs are Seo Siyeon’s lol
Singerstar’s impact is seriously unbelievable.
[best] Isn’t Seo Siyeon the unbelievable one here?
[best] TMI) If the daily chart comes out exactly like the real-time chart, this will be only the third time in Watermelon’s history that one person has had three songs in the top five.
[best] The terrifying thing is that Seo Siyeon is nine years old…
-Staright already got knocked out of first place? Fuck lol, what a water rocket.
ㄴ Singerstar’s a natural disaster right now.
ㄴ Yeah, but Staright proved themselves with a million albums. The antis were holding rituals wishing them to fail, and now they’re No. 1 for the week with a million first-week sales lol
ㄴ The rigging mutt is here.
ㄴ Yeah, there’s less than half a year left until disbandment, dumbass.
ㄴ Who cares if a group that’ll be gone in a few months sells a million albums?
“Mhehe…”
No matter how much of it was thanks to the audition program’s momentum, seeing several songs with my name on the chart made me feel strangely pleased.
I felt as though I had really become a genius singer, as though I could do anything.
But I knew better than anyone that reality wasn’t like that, so I quietly closed the community.
“It’s the first time a song sung in my voice has reached number one on the charts.”
Songs like “Starry Night” and “pray for” had all fallen from second or third place, while “glassy sky,” which had dominated first place for so long, was led more by Yuseolha’s voice than mine.
That made “Christmas of the day” effectively my first number-one song on the charts.
I was happy about that, but at the same time, I felt strangely displeased that I had reached number one with someone else’s song rather than one of my own.
‘Well, I’m not exactly in a position to complain after taking the song exactly as it was.’
This song in particular had borrowed everything from the lyrical concept to the melody.
But from my perspective, I had no choice. There was no way I could create a new song on the spot when the time came.
In my previous life, my specialty had been idol songs.
That was why most of the songs I had copied after possessing this body were idol songs, and they weren’t suitable for me to use right now.
Well, maybe it would have been different if this were an idol audition like Produce, but since it wasn’t, things had become a little awkward.
‘I could use them if I really wanted to…’
Since they were dance songs, I would have to dance myself unless I rearranged them, and naturally, I wasn’t very good at dancing.
Of course, there was nothing stopping me from practicing, but finding a dance instructor after entering the shared house would be rather difficult.
If Lee Hyena were still here, I could have asked her for help, but now there was no point.
‘Ah, well, I can’t do them anyway since they don’t have choreography.’
Technically, I could make choreography if I really wanted to… but there was no way the quality would be very good.
Well, whether it happened someday or sometime in the near future, there would come a time when I made idol songs. After all, at my core, I was an idol producer.
If that never happened, I could always sell the songs off at a reasonable price.
If they got to see the light of day that way, I thought I would probably feel pretty good.
“Then what should I use for the next round?”
Assuming the finale song was more or less complete, I still had to show something new in this round…
“No, actually, I think I’ve really done just about everything I can.”
What else was there to do here…? Honestly, I’d done a band song, hip-hop, a ’90s ballad, a pop-style emotional ballad, an arranged anime OST, and a tearjerker ballad. On top of that, I’d even done a cheer song…
“I have done quite a lot.”
But when I thought about it, I had never properly done an idol song.
Because it was embarrassing.
Honestly, if I wanted to, I could bring a solo idol song, attach some simple little wiggling choreography, and perform it.
But no matter that I had become a girl, worn revealing outfits onstage, and used the title “unnie”…!
‘I’m not really a woman.’
I was, after all, an adult man wearing an elementary-schoolgirl’s disguise.
Naturally, I had only done that brief idol song during the preliminaries because I was truly, desperately determined. I’d gone into it thinking that losing meant death, so I hadn’t even had the chance to feel embarrassed or anything else.
“It would be a shame not to use Jellypop.”
I was planning to remake it and release it separately at some point later.
Actually, when I looked around online, there were plenty of people who wanted an official release of Jellypop, even though they liked the other songs too.
In fact, the video with just Jellypop uploaded to YouTube had already surpassed a million views.
Most of my stages had more views than that, of course, but I was still a little surprised that a song less than a minute long had passed a million views.
That might have been proof of how much buzz Singerstar had generated… but a great song was still a great song.
As always, people’s ears paid no attention to the era.
“Maybe I should just do Jellypop this time.”
Jellypop was, in fact, a song with relatively childish lyrics and an almost childlike atmosphere.
That was why every idol who had sung the song in my previous life had been a minor.
To be honest, Jellypop might not have been a bad choice for me right now.
“Let’s think about it a little longer.”
In the end, I put off making a decision.
Even so, I was a little reluctant to wear cute clothes and perform cute choreography on a live stage watched by the entire nation.
‘And there are fucking tons of people in the audience this time.’
But I had already begun to sense it then.
There were no truly workable concepts left for me anymore.
* * *
“Ah, I see. So that means there still aren’t any members besides me? Am I understanding you correctly?”
“Ahaha. Of course not. We already have several trainees we’re in contact with, and the company itself also has trainees who are good enough to be selected for the debut lineup. So! You don’t need to worry.”
Lee Hyena let out a deep sigh at the producer’s words.
A great many agencies had approached her. Even large entertainment companies had made her solo offers, while there were plenty of places, from small to mid-sized agencies, that wanted her to debut in a group.
‘More than ten places made me concrete offers.’
Among them, Lee Hyena chose a company that had a fairly well-known name even among mid-sized agencies.
It had produced top-tier idols before and had both the name and capital to support numerous second- and third-tier idol groups.
Yet the fellow trainees who had been there right before she joined were gone by the time she entered.
Naturally, they hadn’t run away. Due to complicated internal circumstances, the debut lineup had been split into two.
‘What company in the world prepares two girl groups for debut at the same time…?’
More precisely, the company had two production divisions. The two teams, called Division 1 and Division 2, were rivals.
In the midst of all this, there was the next-generation girl-group debut project that Division 1 had originally been working on.
But Division 2 suddenly got greedy and recruited Lee Hyena without properly consulting Division 1, obtaining approval only from one director in their own camp.
Then they said, ‘We brought Lee Hyena in too, so the next-generation girl-group debut is ours, right?’
Naturally, Division 1 and the directors backing it strongly objected, and the president’s solution was to split the debut lineup in two, like Solomon.
The trainees Division 1 had been preparing would debut under Division 1 as planned, while Division 2 would put together a separate debut lineup.
A catastrophe had occurred: a mid-sized agency that wasn’t even a major corporation was preparing two girl groups at the same time.
So Division 2 was screwed, and so was Lee Hyena, whom Division 2 had recruited.
Someone might say,
‘Why didn’t you look into things properly?’
But as a twenty-year-old who could hardly be anything but a novice at such complicated social and professional dealings, Lee Hyena couldn’t question why a director rather than the company president had shown up on the day of the contract.
I mean, how could she say to the director who had come in the president’s place because he was busy, ‘The president has to come if I’m going to sign!’?
On top of that, this was a fairly large company, so she never imagined that something this absurd would happen less than two weeks after she joined.
“Don’t worry. I’ll gather good members and… crush those filthy Division 1 bastards.”
“Ehehe…”
* * *
What is a VTuber?
Apparently, a VTuber was someone who wore the skin of a virtual anime-style character and worked as both an Internet streamer and an idol.
Naturally, Im Ji-hye had no idea that such a thing existed until recently.
Even though she spoke fluent Japanese and had spent the previous year on a working holiday in Japan, this was the first time she had ever heard of it.
But after her former colleague Saki recommended it, she looked into the VTuber profession out of curiosity.
“This seems like a fucking sweet deal.”
She reached that conclusion almost instantly.
After that, everything proceeded at lightning speed.
She had once been a trainee at a major entertainment company, had experience appearing on broadcasts, and, above all, possessed singing skills at a level that could overwhelm nearly every utaite currently active.
From StarLive’s perspective, it was as though a monster had rolled in right before the application deadline.
‘Wait, someone who can both dance and sing at a high level is applying here?’
StarLive was currently centered on Internet broadcasting, but since it was considering an idol business in the long term, it naturally accepted Im Ji-hye right away.
She could dance, she could sing, and she was even a total social butterfly who had served as president of her university’s Korea-Japan exchange club, so she was good at talking too.
Nor was she completely ignorant of Japanese otaku culture, so at that level, she seemed more than capable of adapting further while broadcasting.
There had apparently been some controversy in Korea, but the moment they confirmed that it amounted to nothing more than the sort of trash rumors floating around online communities, everything proceeded without any further deliberation.
“Ah. Japan. It’s been a while.”
Before Singerstar had even ended, Im Ji-hye visited Japan to sign the contract for StarLive’s third-generation members.