Chapter 79
The pinnacle of a field.
More specifically, a shout-out from the emperor of the VTuber world—a field closely connected to the internet singer Mikansei.
Of course, even the VTuber industry had yet to enter its heyday.
Compared to the scale I remembered from my previous life, it was still only a fraction of that size.
Even so, a shout-out from a major VTuber with 670,000 Twitter followers was an incredible salvation for me as I sank into the depths.
People who had come from Chiyuki's Twitter began flooding the comments on “Happiness Theory,” and thanks to the word of mouth spreading primarily through Twitter, it took only a week to surpass 10,000 views.
Momentum was truly frightening.
The times had changed, and TikTok had become the center of popular trends.
In Korea, TikTok was unusually shunned, losing out to Reels and Shorts before degenerating into a culture for bratty kids, but TikTok's influence in Japan at this time was immense.
Algorithms are incredibly complicated and utterly impossible to predict.
And the minimum requirement for a song to be chosen by that algorithm is…
“The melody has to be memorable.”
Happiness Theory met that necessary and sufficient condition. It was composed with short-form content in mind from the very beginning.
[幸せ理論チャレンジ。高音どこまで上げられますか？(Happiness Theory Challenge: How High Can You Sing?)] [Views: 3.02 million]
A month had passed since Chiyuki's shout-out.
With just one catalyst, the Happiness Theory challenge began spreading at a frightening speed, centered around TikTok.
The highlight of Happiness Theory is in such an extremely high register that even I had trouble hitting it. It was fast-paced, and the sections where you could breathe were short.
That was why Japanese TikTok influencers began making short-form videos of themselves singing the highlight of Happiness Theory.
And the effect was tremendous.
It took only a month to break one million views.
As that happened, not only the challenge but also the quality of the song itself and the music video's aesthetic began receiving attention.
It may sound a little self-congratulatory, but I'm an artist who has won four Korean Music Awards.
Not every song I make can be good, but this was my comeback song after setting aside my creative drive and languishing in a slump for several months.
Naturally, I was confident in the song's quality.
The music video made by Yuina's uncle's company was also quite stylish.
A girl riding a motorcycle and racing down a rain-slicked road.
The girl was wearing a school uniform while racing down the road with a manic smile on her face. The strange sense of liberation and speed it conveyed, combined with the song's fast and intense melody, was more than enough to catch on in short-form content.
“Hmm…”
For some reason, the sight of someone racing down the road on a motorcycle made me think of Seo Siyeon's parents…
Still, they probably hadn't made it that way intentionally.
Because the public knew that her parents had died, but they didn't know that they had died while speeding down a highway.
“Wow. Even thinking about it again, they were insane.”
The fact that a timid child like Seo Siyeon had come from people like that… Genes were truly strange.
In any case, just as word of mouth creates more word of mouth, one Short creates another Short.
And those Shorts create views, while those views create positions on the music charts.
And those chart positions create a new influx of listeners.
And if you manage to properly ride the wave in that endless cycle…
[Happiness Theory]
[30,972,891 views][Uploaded 6 months ago]
[MIKANSEI][400,000 subscribers][1 video]
It even becomes possible to experience the magic of gaining 400,000 subscribers in half a year.
And while Mikansei was going through that transformation…
“I think it would be best for you to graduate early.”
“…I'm still only in fourth grade, though?”
I was suddenly advised to graduate early.
* * *
Sojin Arts Middle School was a private school in the heart of Seoul.
It was a foundation-run school with its middle and high schools attached, and many aspiring artists enrolled there.
I had intended to attend this school from the beginning.
That was why I hadn't bought a house near the orphanage and was only renting a studio to work in.
After all, there was no chance property values here would ever rise, so there was no point buying a house I'd soon leave and wasting the money.
I had simply planned to enter middle school and buy a house then.
That meant my escape from the orphanage was delayed considerably… but there was no reason to throw money away, was there?
“So why do I have to graduate early…? I don't mind, of course.”
“For one thing, as always, the problem going forward is time. If you want to resume normal activities, a regular school where attendance isn't flexible will have clear limitations…”
I nodded after hearing Lee Ha-jun out.
He was right.
At a regular school rather than an arts middle school, handling attendance was quite difficult.
It was one thing while I was only composing, but once the epidemic passed and it was time for me to resume normal activities, attendance would become a huge obstacle.
“…But what am I supposed to do? I'm not that good at studying.”
Naturally, since I was still in elementary school, I was handling the lessons without any trouble.
But if you asked whether I was a genius capable of graduating early…
Well, obviously not.
“There's a separate system for that. Don't worry about it…”
Something like that existed? I had never heard of it.
Still, they wouldn't have brought it up if it weren't possible.
From what I heard, all I needed was a genius-level achievement that would satisfy the people at the education office. Since I had won a Korean Music Award, there was no way I could be rejected.
“Then what do I have to do?”
“Wear your mask properly and attend school diligently.”
“Huh? That's all?”
“You can return to your individual activities as well.”
In fact, I didn't even need to attend school properly.
Because 80 percent of it was conducted remotely.
As was the unwritten rule for online classes, I simply left the lesson running and always did something else.
So what I had to do for early graduation was…
“Nothing?”
As expected, in matters like this, the power of adults got things done much more directly than a child could.
A mere month after I spoke with him, Lee Hajin came back with permission for me to graduate early from the education office.
However, even after my early graduation was confirmed, it wasn't the end of everything.
I had graduated, so I had to enroll somewhere.
Sojin Arts Middle School was fundamentally an arts middle school.
As such, it held basic entrance exams and interviews.
Round 1: Practical examination.
Round 2: Interview.
It was the time of year when summer vacation had ended, autumn had passed, and the weather was beginning to turn cold.
I took the practical examination.
I listed vocal performance as my major, sang a suitable song that I had performed during Singer Star, and passed.
It was such an absurdly unfair test that you could say failing was impossible.
Because the interviewers and teachers at schools like this had generally graduated from arts colleges.
Most of them had failed on the path to becoming singers and turned to education, or had worked as critics.
Given their backgrounds, an objective assessment of my ability was impossible in the face of the authority represented by the Korean Music Awards.
I wondered if that was why public institutions had begun conducting blind tests during interviews these days.
Even if they had properly judged my ability, I would have passed with ease anyway.
After passing through puberty, my vocals had grown another level.
Meanwhile, Mikansei's subscriber count continued to increase at a frightening pace.
And separate from Mikansei, there was another problem troubling me…
“The numbers look a little strange…”
NOIRIS, the group I had debuted with Haruka and Lee Hyena at the center.
Their performance, now that they were approaching their first anniversary, was strange.
* * *
I generally didn't pay much attention to NOIRIS.
More precisely, it would be more accurate to say that I had no need to pay attention to them.
Because in the process of debuting and producing NOIRIS, the only thing I had handled was the music.
And the music was essentially running on autopilot.
What I meant was that I was using the songs I had made in my previous life almost exactly as they were.
In other words, there was little room for me to get involved in the first place.
Promotion and album design were all handled by the production team Lee Ha-jun had assembled, and the music videos were handled the same way.
There are two criteria for judging an idol's tier.
One is popularity.
This includes chart rankings and music video views.
The other is the size of the fandom.
Album sales and the ability to draw an audience to concerts.
To begin with, the songs I released as NOIRIS's title tracks had either dominated the charts in my previous life or at least reached No. 1 on the daily charts, so their chart performance was quite good.
By popularity alone, they were competing for second place even among the top-tier groups. For a group in its first year, that was an excellent result.
But in contrast, their album sales… The most recent album had sold 370,000 copies.
That was the level of sales at the bottom end of top-tier girl groups.
It wasn't a small number. In fact, it was quite high for a group in its first year.
The problem was… most of those sales came from Japan.
In other words, NOIRIS's Korean fandom was unnaturally small compared to its Japanese fandom.
The center of the fandom consisted entirely of Haruka's Japanese fans.
Even if they could fill a dome in Japan, I wasn't even sure they could fill Jangchung or Hwajeong for two nights in Korea.
“Is it because we've gone too far in the easy-listening direction?”
The biggest problem was that even I didn't know why.
That was why I asked someone who was fairly well-versed in the industry about the issue.
“Isn't it a little too greedy for someone who's only in their first year?”
The person who said that to me was Saki of FYG, whose face I hadn't seen in a long time.