Damn Idol Chapter 116
I have no idea what they’re talking about.
Of course I know what a photocard is.
But it’s a little surprising that it’s such an important product.
To begin with, even when I was promoting with For The Youth, I was someone who didn’t want to sell MD.
Fans’ wallets had limits too, and I was worried that if they bought goods, they wouldn’t have money left to buy albums.
Of course, if we wanted, we could bundle goods and albums together.
Like releasing limited-edition goods and packaging them with an album.
We could even make it impossible to buy the goods separately and inflate album sales that way.
But there’s a high chance those wouldn’t be included in the album sales counted by the devil.
[If one tries to possess someone’s moment with currency that can be exchanged for anything in the world, then that is an offering, worship, and conquest.]
The devil’s definition of album counting.
According to this definition, purchases made without any true desire to possess are not counted.
In other words, buying something while grumbling because you have no choice, even knowing you’re being played by marketing tactics, is meaningless.
You have to buy it because you want it.
In that sense, fan signing events are the same.
I remember that to attend a For The Youth fan signing event, you had to buy over 100 albums.
Was it around 130?
That’s probably right.
I have an uncanny memory when it comes to album sales.
But that doesn’t mean the devil counts all 130 copies.
This depends on each fan’s tendencies.
Someone might buy 30 copies with a sincere fan’s heart, and force themselves to buy the remaining 100 because of the fan signing event.
Then only 30 copies are counted.
But someone else might think one album is enough, yet buy 129 more because of the fan signing event.
Then exactly one copy is counted.
That’s why, more than anything, I have to make the album well.
Even if someone bought our album for the purpose of going to a fan signing event, it has to be of a quality they can happily give as a gift to someone else.
Enough that the person who receives that gift listens to our album, is moved by it, and buys the next album.
Not only that, it can’t be an album they listen to once and forget. It has to be an album they think of periodically and listen to again.
Then the physical album will keep selling steadily.
Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon stayed on the Billboard 200 album chart for a whopping 949 weeks, setting a Guinness record.
Not 949 days. 949 weeks.
Even counted in years, that’s a full 18 years.
There’s no way that can be done with marketing or buzz.
It’s simply the power of the music and the cohesion of the album.
Because I aimed for that sort of thing, I always focused only on the quality of the album, and I didn’t know much about goods or fan culture.
I probably knew to some extent when I was doing For The Youth, but that was already well over a hundred years ago.
I never expected to return to K-pop, so there was no reason I would have kept it in my memory.
That was why the things the members told me were fascinating.
“After that, there’s the culture of fan tributes. If we connect it to birthday cafés…”
I listened quietly, but there was one thing I simply couldn’t understand, so I opened my mouth.
“I get that things like that exist, but is it true that every fandom does them? Not just certain fandoms or certain groups?”
“Of course everyone has to.”
“No, I mean, even unpopular groups do that?”
“Yes. The less popular you are, the more you have to focus on fan culture. Do you know how grateful you should be for that small fandom?”
Is that so?
“Don’t people say you’re making too big a fuss?”
“No way. Why would that be making a fuss?”
As I listened to them after that, I realized the part I had been the most mistaken about.
I had thought that after gaining popularity, we had to gather core fans.
In other words, I had thought that we needed to make the music widely known first, then make the singer known.
Billboard works exactly like that.
If you gain popularity in the LA underground, your songs slowly start playing on LA radio.
If that song rises higher, it starts playing on California radio, and then it spreads to neighboring states
before they attach marketing to it and aim for Billboard.
Around that point, an agency will attach itself, you’ll film a music video or appear on talk shows, and that’s when the singer’s star quality becomes meaningful.
Until then, the music is the most important thing.
Of course, success doesn’t only happen that way.
You can already start seeing signs of it now, but once the COVID period passes, visual stars who debut through Instagram or TikTok will appear.
There will also be people who succeed by pushing a specific concept.
For example, the song is a sexy R&B tune, but when you see the singer, he’s a handsome nerd, and so on.
Even so, American agencies traditionally prefer success through radio airplay.
For singers like me, who are disadvantaged because of race, we have no choice but to cling even harder to radio.
That was why I had intended to follow the same path to success in Korea.
From Under the Streetlight to Résumé.
Hadn’t everything been progressing smoothly?
But looking closely, K-pop idols are a little different from that format.
They don’t build a fandom after gaining popularity. They go together with the fandom from the very beginning.
In a sense, it even feels like they’re able to rise to stardom because the fandom exists.
So my idea of taking care of the fandom after first succeeding was wrong.
There’s no need to be stubborn about something like this.
A particular culture has particular rules, and you have to respect them.
“I understand. Then what should we do?”
“First, I think we need to settle on either an official café or an official homepage, then recruit a fan club.”
“What else? Speak freely.”
The members began pouring out opinions.
There was talk of V Live, which I already knew about, and also about recruiting the first generation of the fan club, goods to provide to fan club members—especially photocards—and the upload schedule for our official SNS accounts.
“But Sion. Will V Live accept us? Not just anyone can broadcast there. I’m also worried about Lion.”
At Iion’s words, I shook my head.
“Choe Daeho’s influence won’t reach there.”
Just like the music sites, wasn’t it operated by a major corporation?
“But there is a chance they won’t accept us because of their own standards.”
As far as I knew, only celebrities could do V Live, and Three Months and a Hundred Days was ambiguous to call celebrities.
Three Months and a Hundred Days didn’t have an agency, and we had never appeared on a music show.
We had high recognition, but I doubted a major corporation would grant permission based on an abstract standard like recognition.
There would definitely be certain conditions.
But it didn’t matter.
Because while listening to the members, an idea had come to me.
“I have a good idea.”
“What is it?”
“We make an app.”
“You mean making the official homepage into an app?”
“No. If we’re going to make one anyway, it should be bigger in scale than that. I’m thinking of developing it as an app where all the ideas we talked about earlier are possible.”
We could include a real-time streaming function, communicate through messages, and the members could upload photos.
We could also announce schedules, allow advance reservations for concerts, and make a space where fans could upload proof shots.
It feels like we can just shove everything in there.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it would be good to make all activities happen only there.
From what I heard, fans seem to enjoy doing things on their own.
For example, putting up photos on subway outdoor billboards, donating together, running birthday cafés, and so on.
So aside from the things that are more fun when the fans do them themselves, we can just shove everything into the app’s functions.
“What did you call it earlier? Top loader decorating? A space to make and sell those, or a space to exchange photocards…”
No, now that I think about it, is there any need to make them exchange photocards?
We should just let fans buy the photocards they want.
I don’t want people talking about things like price differences between members’ photocards for no reason.
It also feels kind of bad to make people spend money while getting annoyed until the photocard they want comes out.
Of course, there may be fans who like that sort of thing, but I don’t.
If they’re buying goods, shouldn’t they be able to buy them happily at a reasonable price?
Feeling like my brain was starting to work, I took out my phone and began frantically jotting down ideas, and Onsaemiro asked,
“Wouldn’t it take too long to put all that in?”
“To make the app?”
“Yeah. And I don’t really know, but I heard if you make one in a hurry, there are tons of bugs and stuff.”
There’s no way.
Korean developers are incredibly fast and good.
Even when I was active on Billboard, if it was something like this, I would commission it to Korea, where they ignore things like work-life balance as long as you pay them.
Korean developers are the kind of people who will make the impossible possible if you offer around five times the market rate.
What was the company that nodded while going gongmire, gongmire when I told them I’d pay ten times if they finished in ten days, nine times in eleven days, and eight times in twelve?
They were really good.
For reference, I remember they finished development in nine days and asked whether that meant they would get eleven times the pay.
There are many things money can’t buy, but at the very least, an app isn’t one of them.
As I was thinking that and searching for companies, I received an international call from Eddie.
It’s been a while.
I had asked him to deliver my songs to the masters, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it.
Because I already knew how things would go anyway.
Still, I should ask out of courtesy, right?
“Did you deliver all the tracks?”
—Am I some agency manager? You ask me that the moment I pick up?
Oh, is that so?
But considering he said that, he seemed to be working awfully hard.
—I’ve only delivered them to four people so far. Three left.
Since he was meeting musicians while carrying out the documentary filming schedule, it seemed to be taking a bit longer.
Well, I can understand that.
“Then what’s up?”
—Do you happen to know something called Colors Show?
“Colors Show? The one produced by Colors Media?”
—That’s right. So you do know it?
Of course I know it.
COLORS.
A music platform run by COLORS MEDIA, a media content company based in Berlin, Germany.
Even though COLORS is a music platform, it places visual aesthetics at the core of its platform value, and the thing it’s putting quite a lot of effort into growing is A COLORS SHOW.
Commonly called Colors Show.
It’s pretty appealing content.
Visual beauty created by nothing but the beauty of color, without a single stage device.
A short song of around five minutes.
One hundred percent live.
Should I call it content that competes purely with singing ability, without anything to dazzle the eyes?
As far as I know, there won’t be any Korean artists appearing on Colors Show in 2017.
Some will appear soon, but even then, they won’t be K-pop artists; they’ll be R&B artists.
I don’t know why that is either.
Whether Colors Show dislikes K-pop idols, or whether they simply don’t fit the show’s concept.
In any case, Colors Show is popular content even now.
Its YouTube channel probably has over three million subscribers, and its views reach tens of millions.
But it hasn’t properly grown yet.
In about three or four years, its subscribers will surpass ten million, and hit videos will easily reach 100 million views.
Thanks to that, some people will even rise to stardom through this content.
“I do know it. But why?”
—There were some Colors Media staff on the documentary team we’re filming with this time.
“Yeah.”
—Somehow, they became interested in your music. They asked if you’d be willing to appear, so I said you would.
Since I’d only been using Korean, I thought I had mixed up the English tense.
“You said I would?”
—Yeah.
“Why?”
—It’s a good opportunity.
Didn’t he just tell me not to treat him like a manager?