Damn Idol Episode 9
To be honest, Team Leader Choi Suyeon had liked Han Sion from the moment he first walked in.
She had no idea what bastard had taken his profile photo with their foot—it had been a selfie—but he was far better-looking than in the picture.
No, to be more precise, his aura was overwhelming.
There was an inexplicable melancholy about him, and at the same time, something obsessive.
On top of that, he gave off an impression that made him difficult to treat carelessly.
“I haven’t prepared any performance or self-composed songs in particular. I’m sorry.”
“……
All right. If that’s what you say, then that’s that.”
Contrary to what Han Sion guessed, Choi Suyeon hadn’t been offended by that exchange.
Han Sion was clearly the one saying “I’m sorry,” but she’d somehow gotten the feeling that Ryan Entertainment was at fault for not informing him in advance, and that had only flustered her.
Originally, they were supposed to hear the free-choice song first, then the assigned song, but without even realizing it, she had given Han Sion the choice of what to sing first.
Considering that Choi Suyeon, who had seen countless trainees and aspiring celebrities, had felt that way, his aura was anything but ordinary.
But looking back, even that much had been nothing.
The real incident began when he started singing.
When Han Sion sang
He was good.
Far too good.
Of course, Take Scene could sing well too.
After all, Take Scene’s main vocalist had been evaluated internally as the best singer in the history of Ryan’s main vocals.
But this was on a different level.
She couldn’t quite explain it in words, but it was the kind of feeling she only got from the very top singers in the music industry, the ones people called “teachers.”
A sense of crisis rang like an alarm bell.
This wouldn’t do.
He couldn’t be put on the same stage as Take Scene.
They hadn’t decided yet how much viewer votes would be reflected, but he would clearly sweep them all.
But……
‘You’re telling me to let that go?’
They had to put him on Team B if they were going to lure him in as a trainee later.
But even that thought became meaningless once he sang his free-choice song.
Melisma, .
It was the name of a singer she had never heard of in her life, and the name of a song she had never heard before.
The New Artist Development Team didn’t place much importance on musical knowledge to begin with.
They weren’t people who selected singers; they selected products.
Turning the products they selected into singers was the Training Team’s job.
When he said he had personally arranged a blues song from the 1940s, she’d thought he really did have that indie-obsessive streak.
But once the song began, everything changed.
He was insane.
No, what kind of lunatic sang a song like this at an idol audition?
And then what exactly was he so dissatisfied with that he left with his cheeks puffed out?
Was this some kind of hidden camera prank?
You know, those things.
Where they disguise a famous pianist as an amateur and film a prank.
Right. That had to be it.
That kid was a professional singer from New Orleans or Berklee……
‘No, he’s twenty!’
The CEO had said they should put the kids with strong personalities into Team B.
But what Han Sion had shown wasn’t personality.
It was a nuke launched from the territory of personality.
This was troublesome.
They couldn’t not pick him, but she was afraid of what would happen if they did.
In the end, Choi Suyeon reached a conclusion.
This was clearly something where CEO Choi Daeho should be the one eliminated……
“Team Leader.”
“Huh? No. I just thought that without realizing it.”
“Pardon?”
“Uh…… Never mind. What is it?”
“Can we play the original version of that song just now?”
“Oh, ah. Sure, let’s hear it. We don’t know how much he arranged it.”
And so they searched YouTube for Melisma’s and listened to it……
“Can you…… even call this an arrangement?”
It was just a fairly pleasant acoustic guitar blues song.
There was no electric sound at all.
At this point, hadn’t he just taken the lyrics and made an entirely new song?
Judging from the comments and view count, the singer didn’t even seem all that famous.
After hesitating for a moment, Choi Suyeon made a decision.
“Let’s leave it to the CEO.”
“That would be best, right?”
“That kid…… is going to make it no matter what. Maybe he’ll even join Take Scene.”
Whether they would put Han Sion into Team B and blow up the ratings, or create a spot that didn’t exist and put him into Take Scene, didn’t seem like something she should decide.
“Send me today’s footage right away…… Everyone worked hard today.”
“Um, Team Leader.”
“Yeah?”
“There are still participants left after him.”
“Ah, right. We need to see more.”
“And something suddenly occurred to me.”
“What is it?”
“We didn’t see participant Han Sion dance……”
“Ah, right……”
“What if he’s stiff as a board?”
“But if he is, wouldn’t that be fine in its own way? With skills like that, he should have at least one weakness.”
“Uh, is that so?”
In the end, that was how they rationalized it.
* * *
As I left Ryan Entertainment and checked my phone, I saw a ton of missed calls from Seo Seunghyeon of BVB.
Without even hesitating, I called him right away, and a breathless question flew at me without so much as a greeting.
—The songs uploaded to SoundCloud were composed by you, right, Han Sion?
“Yes. That’s right.”
—H-have you already sold them by any chance?
“No. I haven’t sold them yet.”
—Not a single one?
“Not a single one.”
—Th-this seems like there must have been some mistake, but you entered my email address on your SoundCloud account, Han Sion.
“It wasn’t a mistake.”
—Then?
“I did it on purpose. So I could meet with you separately, Team Leader Seo.”
—You wanted…… to meet me separately outside?
“……
No. What are you talking about?”
What an absurd man.
“I need someone to sell the songs for me. Someone who knows the idol scene inside out.”
—I belong to BVB, though.
“In show business, composers and trainers are free to change companies, and a lot of them are freelancers, right? Do you know why?”
—I’m not sure.
“Because their professional competence has nothing to do with the company’s infrastructure. I think the same applies to song development in an A&R team.”
Discovering good songs, attaching good arrangers, and outsourcing them to good producers.
That work was the most important thing in a singer’s activities, but it was less standardized than one might think.
It depended entirely on the A&R producer’s personal ability.
They held Song Camps and seminars to resolve that issue, but individual skill was still important.
“And A&R teams’ ban on side jobs is interpreted fairly generously, isn’t it?”
It was quite common for A&R teams to help connect star composers to other companies in order to get close to them.
Because favors tended to come back around.
“For now, try selling just six songs. One of them seems like it would suit NOP, so you have a pretext too, don’t you?”
—The pay is……
“I’ll give you half of the song sale price.”
—……! You’re serious, right?
“Of course.”
If I offered 10%, he would think he was cooperating. If I offered 20%, he would think he was assisting.
But if I offered 50%, he would think he’d won the lottery.
After all, no one refused to collect their winnings just because going to the bank was a hassle.
This was what was nice about being free from money.
Because other people weren’t.
“Let’s write the contract today. What time do you get off work?”
* * *
The talk with Seo Seunghyeon ended well.
Among them, we decided to sell a song called to BVB Entertainment as NOP’s follow-up song.
Seo Seunghyeon said a song called would also suit NOP well, but there was a better option for that one.
“Try selling Selfish to DROP OUT. As a title track.”
I had forgotten a lot about Korea, but there were some beings I could never forget.
I knew who the current president of Korea was, and I knew who was the best player on the national soccer team.
And I knew who was doing the best in the entertainment industry.
DROP OUT.
A five-member boy group.
I didn’t know details like their years active or album sales records.
Still, it was impossible not to know DROP OUT.
They were the only boy group that could go to a military慰問 performance and get the soldiers to sing along in unison.
Wouldn’t even my money-hungry eldest aunt’s husband know a song or two by DROP OUT?
They weren’t a Tier 1 group; they were the number one group.
“DROP OUT? They don’t take title tracks from other people. Since their first album, all their title tracks have been self-produced, no exceptions.”
“Push it anyway.”
“There’s no news of a comeback either. It could take years.”
“They’ll do one soon. As far as I know.”
I didn’t know the exact timing, but they would do one soon.
This year or next year, anyway.
The reason I wanted to sell Selfish to DROP OUT was simple.
They used to sing this song all the time at encore concerts.
I’d seen interviews where the members chose Selfish as their favorite song, and I’d seen them arrange it in their own way and put on special stages with it.
Selfish was a very useful song even among the songs I’d composed.
I hadn’t released it while I was active as GOTM—it wasn’t a song that suited the image of a traditional band player—but usually, I achieved my first Billboard No. 1 of my career with Selfish.
It suited my vocal tone well, and it was also a song that wasn’t bound by era.
What that meant was that it could hit No. 1 on Billboard if released in 2019, and it could hit No. 1 on Billboard if released in 2024 too.
Of course, it couldn’t be released just any old way; it needed proper marketing. But that was how powerful the song itself was.
I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed like a song that hit DROP OUT’s tastes perfectly, so wouldn’t it sell as a title track?
Of course, someone might think it would be better for me to sing it myself.
But that was something I could do in the next life.
In this life, I was just going to watch how DROP OUT took Selfish and arranged it in a K-pop style, how they wrote boy-group lyrics for it, and how they promoted it.
I was curious what kind of results it would get, too.
Besides, it wasn’t like I found it particularly惜しい.
I had quite a few songs as good as Selfish.
“What if they say they’ll take it as a B-side?”
“Refuse. It has to be the title track.”
“Honestly, I think it’ll be difficult…… but all right.”
“I don’t have any specific plans for the rest, so sell them as you see fit. I’ll give you a few more songs soon.”
“But, Han Sion.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you choose me……? With songs of this caliber, you could contact companies directly and sell them yourself.”
As expected, the power of money was strong.
Once I said I would give him half the song fee, he unconsciously accepted that he was in the position of having been chosen.
The reason I chose Seo Seunghyeon was to naturally obtain connections.
For a regressor, the word “connections” meant something different than it did for ordinary people.
Even if I had built deep friendships in my past life with NARAS members who were judges for the Grammy Awards, one regression would bring that all back to zero.
There was no guarantee that just because we had been close in a previous life, we would become close again.
In my life, a fellow singer who had naturally become my best friend could just as naturally become my enemy.
So to me, connections meant “people whose behavioral patterns I can accurately predict.”
People I could grow close to or distance myself from depending on my actions.
People I could make trust me, or make distrust me.
If I built up those things, layer by layer, then a twenty-year-old kid from the East—eighteen in America—could hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart with his debut song.
But connections weren’t something one could build with a fixed objective in mind.
You couldn’t obtain useful connections by wandering around LA trying to learn things like “how to get a Billboard No. 1.”
You had to enter the industry.
Then, as you did whatever work you could, connections would build by coincidence—or by inevitability.
Wasn’t CEO Lee Hyeonseok of LB Studio the same?
If I needed a link to the indie scene in my next life, I would go to LB Studio.
And I would book the exact same time slot and record the exact same songs.
To me, that was a connection.
And currently, the only person in the Korean K-pop industry I had properly become acquainted with was Team Leader Seo Seunghyeon.
And he worked at a fairly large company called BVB Entertainment.
It was true that I had no other choice, but even if I had, he was still a fairly attractive starting point.
But I couldn’t say it like that.
“Just because. You made a good impression on me, Team Leader Seo Seunghyeon.”
“You mean I suited your taste……?”
“Ah, seriously. You’ve been saying weird things since earlier.”
And so, Seo Seunghyeon began working for me.
Originally, I had intended to debut at BVB through Seo Seunghyeon, but this direction wasn’t bad either, as a substitute.
Now Coming Up Next had to pick me……
I wasn’t sure.
Team Leader Choi Suyeon, who interviewed me, hadn’t looked all that positive.
Maybe because I was quite far from the K-pop style, she felt professional resistance toward me.
If I had possessed even more overwhelming skills, that wouldn’t have happened.
I should practice.