Chapter 61
Filming for “Do You Like Music?” had come to an end.
After another hellish long-haul flight, the production crew arrived in Korea and completely disbanded at the airport, while I returned to Neulneul Orphanage in a car driven by my manager, Kim Jun-hyung.
“Oh! You’re back!”
“Yep.”
Travel is still travel.
In other words, it means it’s freaking exhausting.
With my body practically screaming at me to lie down in bed as quickly as possible, I roughly ignored anyone who tried to talk to me and immediately flopped onto my bed.
I had collapsed from exhaustion after the journey, and I didn’t wake up until a full twenty hours later.
After sleeping for that long, what did I have to do once I woke up…
“What do you mean, what? …I have to go to school.”
I went to school to fulfill my duty as a student.
It was the moment when three weeks of an extraordinary life came to an end and I returned to my ordinary routine.
* * *
“Yaaawn…”
At present, there were only two artists signed to BlueSky Entertainment.
Seo Siyeon and Blooming.
Lee Ha-jun was managing the two people with the greatest public buzz in Korea at the moment, but he didn’t actually have much to do.
Blooming had gone into intensive seclusion training to perfect their live performances, locking themselves in the practice room every day, while Seo Siyeon had holed herself up in the new studio she had rented to work on her album even after filming for Do You Like Music? ended.
“…I’m sleepy.”
Thus, Lee Ha-jun had nothing to do now.
Naturally, he had already finished all the basic preparations needed for Blooming’s comeback.
Everything from the promotional process to the album cover and its inclusions.
He had done this work until he was sick of it while managing Winter Girl, and now that the company had plenty of money, he no longer had to grovel to individual producers.
As for Seo Siyeon… he didn’t know when she would make her comeback, so there was nothing he could prepare even if he wanted to.
All he could do was turn down the flood of requests for her to appear on various variety shows.
In fact, the other Singerstar contestants tended to appear on variety shows quite often, but the two artists at BlueSky Entertainment did nothing of the sort.
That wasn’t because of any incompetence on the part of Lee Ha-jun, their CEO. It was simply their choice.
For the time being, Blooming had decided to pursue a somewhat mysterious concept.
Considering each of their backgrounds, they had judged that concealing them to a reasonable extent instead of revealing too much would be more advantageous for building a fandom by giving them an air of mystery.
Information about Blooming’s parents was already scattered all over the Internet, and people had learned that the girls were practically modern-day aristocratic young ladies.
After already using up quite a lot of their image through Singerstar, there was no need for them to appear on even more broadcasts.
And Seo Siyeon simply wasn’t going because she wanted to work on her album, so there wasn’t really anything he could do.
They had agreed from the very beginning of the contract not to interfere with the artist’s personal activities.
Besides, they said you shouldn’t disturb a musician while she was working.
“Well, she’ll manage.”
In Lee Ha-jun’s experience, there was no need to worry about geniuses. It was obvious that, at some point, she would suddenly appear and announce that she had finished her work.
He checked that she was still alive every day, so if she ran into trouble, she would say something.
‘Come to think of it, she hasn’t contacted me today.’
I should check on her a little later.
That was what Lee Ha-jun was doing when he was leisurely making coffee with nothing else to do.
“Uncle Ha-jun.”
Seo Siyeon suddenly walked into the company office, her expression blank but her face somehow looking exhausted.
“I’ve picked out all the songs for the album.”
It had been only three weeks since filming for Do You Like Music? ended.
* * *
While Seo Siyeon was immersed in her album work and living with all the news of the world shut out…
The editing of Do You Like Music? had nearly reached completion after only two weeks. Rather than drag things out, the main producer decided to quickly air the edited footage.
‘No… Why is she making her comeback so soon?’
Because Saki of FYG, who had appeared on the program to promote her solo song, was making her comeback with that song this week.
The company had therefore made what felt almost like a demand for them to release the footage as quickly as possible…
Well, a request from a major corporation phrased that way was practically a threat.
In any case, Joo Hanam, a producer without any power, had no choice but to air the footage quickly, tears in his eyes.
There was no real problem with airing it quickly, but it left a bad taste in his mouth, as though he had lost to a threat.
As always, Joo Hanam focused on Seo Siyeon during this round of editing.
The first episode devoted considerable screen time to a scene in which she took Jia, Saki, and Baek Yuyeon busking in a park on a rainy evening.
As expected, the response was quite good.
Above all, the YouTube response to the performance uploaded after the broadcast was excellent. It broke through 300,000 views in a single day.
The viewership rating was 5.5 percent, which was quite high for a variety show these days, so Joo Hanam was already confident of the program’s success and treated his subordinates to meat that day.
In any case, they also managed to pull out plenty of good scenes for the next episode. The classic song arranged by Seo Siyeon, along with the live performances by various other artists, was more than enough to delight the public’s ears.
‘Though we’re picking this one out and airing it, too.’
In truth, airing every performance was difficult due to time constraints. That was why unaired performances were usually uploaded to YouTube.
Ah, but Seo Siyeon, who was driving both the ratings and the clip views, was an exception. Even performances in which she only participated as a session musician were stuffed into the broadcast.
“Sigh. It’s such a shame we can’t make proper use of this…”
“I know. Honestly, I got goosebumps watching the footage, too…”
The part that needed to air the following week was the section where they traveled from Spain to Italy. It included the new song Seo Siyeon had created while gazing at the stars outside the window.
He wanted to include the process and the result in the program, but at the request of BlueSky Entertainment, he had no choice but to cut almost all of it from the edited version.
Apparently, it could be a spoiler.
Since the song was still quite a long way from being released, the company’s sensitivity about spoilers was understandable, but as a producer, he couldn’t help feeling disappointed.
In any case, what mattered was the ratings.
Honestly, to viewers, the sight of Seo Siyeon among Jia, Saki, and Baek Yuyeon was simply that of beautiful girls and a cute little kid, which was healing enough on its own. They were already pulling in more than sufficient ratings.
It wasn’t as though the YouTube clips were failing to get views, either. They were doing even better than the previous season, so although Joo Hanam felt disappointed, all he could do was react with, “Well, things like that happen!”
“Woohoo!”
However, it didn’t take long for Joo Hanam to rejoice. BlueSky Entertainment contacted him to ask whether he could put back the footage they had previously requested that he edit out.
“I’m not going home until I finish this today!”
“…Yeees.”
Of course, for the person actually responsible for editing it, this was tantamount to opening the gates to a hellish night of overtime.
* * *
Working on a full-length album could take more than a year, and spending several months on one was generally considered normal.
That was because there were so many songs to make. On top of that, singers afflicted with an artistic complex kept scrapping songs and insisting that they were terrible, making it quite difficult to fill an album with more than ten tracks.
Even after creating the songs, adding lyrics, filming a music video, and planning the release… all of it took a considerable amount of time.
“There are twelve songs in total on the full-length album. Would you like to hear them?”
“…I’ll listen later. More importantly, how did you work this quickly?”
“I’m naturally fast. You must have seen that during Singerstar.”
That alone couldn’t explain her speed… and adding lyrics on top of that was no small task.
“I wrote some of the lyrics myself… but I left most of them to lyricists.”
“Hmm? Is that so?”
Well, she could do that without even going through the company.
Still, he couldn’t help thinking it would have been better if she had gone through the company.
Even so, he thought she had found lyrics she liked remarkably quickly.
“Because I gave every song to ten lyricists, had each of them write ten sets of lyrics, and chose the ones I liked.”
“…Are you insane?”
If so, how much money had she spent?
Lee Ha-jun felt his hands begin to tremble.
With the money spent on that, he could have kept the company running for months…
“Oh. We’re rich now, aren’t we?”
Come to think of it, BlueSky Entertainment was no longer a company scraping by because it had no money.
Rather, it had become a company that had to worry about where to spend its overflowing funds.
“…Yes. I suppose we are.”
Seo Siyeon looked at Lee Ha-jun with eyes gone cold.
Receiving such a look from an elementary schoolgirl might have hurt Lee Ha-jun a little.