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Chapter 17
[Wait, is MuP actually debuting an idol group???]
I thought the rumor about Ko Hyunseo going to MuP was total BS, but they revealed the girl group trainees today, holy shit
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- What’s MuP?
└ Music Prove, an indie and band-specialist label
└ Ohh, thanks - I went to see it and Hyun Jaei from PN Youth is in there too. I was sure she’d be PN’s next center, wtf
└ PN’s next girl group is always “coming soon” and then it gets scrapped. Rumor is nearly all the Youth kids left, so it makes sense - Whaaat, Dream Girls Project’s Ko Hyunseo???? So that’s why she never made an Instastar account
[Prove Rookies pass the visual check at least]
www.twibble……
Prove Rookies @PRookies_official
Group Profile Photo …… (see more)
I went to look because they said DGP’s Ko Hyunseo was in it, and they picked these girls really well lol
Pretty but nobody looks like they don’t fit, the group visual chemistry is good. Visuals: pass
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- Fr, small-to-mid company but they picked sharp
- Omg, PN Youth’s Hyun Jaei came out of PN… there really are barely any Youth kids left at PN now
[Is Sua from Prove Rookies maybe this person?]
www.etube……
【[202X Early Admission: Double Winner, Seojeong Arts University & Donghwa Broadcasting Arts University, Practical Music Vocal Major, Final Acceptance] ENLY – Something Fishy (Cover by Kang Sua)】
She looked familiar and then I remembered, the Seojeong Arts student who sang “Something Fishy” so deliciously
Judging by the name, I think it’s her
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- Why would a Seojeong Arts student bother being an idol
└ OP) I thought the same, but the more I look, the more identical she looks lol, cryingggg. How common is it for someone to look like that - Wow, I’ve been thinking this the whole time, like “I’ve seen her somewhere,” thanks to the Kingorithm lol
- Looks like the same person, they look exactly alike lol. Same name too, so it’s a lock?
[Fuck, figure skating fan here, I was seriously shocked to see Hyerin in Prove Rookies]
Joo Hye’s injury was serious and there’d been no news at all since the Junior GP last season
And then suddenly she’s got an idol vibe, fuck, what is this
Not that I dislike it, I’m just seriously baffled. There weren’t even any rumors
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- You too? Me too lol, cryingg. I’ve been staring at the Prove Rookies post for two hours going “what is this.” Hyerin……….
└ OP) I definitely don’t dislike it… but it just feels so weird…… Hyerin, auntie was thinking Olympics with you……… - Is Prove Rookies’ Hyerin a former figure skater??
└ She was on the national team too. A real prospect, yeah. She was good, and after the injury she vanished and I wondered what happened, turns out she just quit - Whoa, she was an athlete
[The Music Prove trainees have so many names I recognize lol]
DGP’s Ko Hyunseo
PN Youth’s Hyun Jaei
Figure skating national team’s Joo Hyerin
These three are on the same team lol. Who’s in charge of casting there, they’re good at their job
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- PN Youth’s Hyun Jaei came out of PN???
└ She showed up today as a Music Prove public trainee, yeah - Off topic, but when is PN’s next girl group actually coming out? I never imagined it wouldn’t happen until Noxia’s contract ended lol… that’s why the Youth kids all leave, idiots
└ Fr. When PN Youth first blew up I thought they’d debut this year. Never thought they’d all leave and the rest get neglected…… - So Hyunseo’s debuting… I thought she’d quit with how little news there was… It was such a waste after DGP, hope she does well ㅠㅠ
[I don’t know girl groups but I can tell Prove Rookies has a lot of super famous people]
Oh, they’re just famous…
The girls are pretty……
And I’m just blankly staring at the thread
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- Actually I like the non-public trainees more lol. Hanbyul is cute
- I’ll accept the national team skater, but is it fair to call DGP and PN Youth super famous?
└ 22. Even among idol fans it’s niche, you’re overselling it
└ Uh, DGP is famous, the debut group Daylight did 150k first-week sales lol
└ That’s all overseas volume though, isn’t she nobody in Korea?
└ I hand you objective numbers and you still whine, fuck, does 150k first-week for a girl group look like shit to you?
└ Why are you flipping out;
The reaction isn’t bad.
I nodded and closed the online community site.
It’s rare for a small-to-mid-sized company’s public trainees to get mentioned all over the place from the start, but apparently the name recognition of Ko Hyunseo, Hyun Jaei, and Joo Hyerin was hard-carrying the team’s buzz numbers.
It had only been a day since the reveal, yet there were more mentions than I expected. Quite a few posts were turning up in keyword searches.
This level isn’t even a flame war, nobody’s picking fights with the team itself… so far it’s mostly positive mentions. It does bother me that so much of the talk is about PN, though…
PN is a major agency, so it can’t be helped.
I decided not to think about it too hard. Right now, regardless of gains and losses, what we needed was a higher absolute volume of mentions.
And what I needed to focus on right now was:
“Hello, Jion! Are you getting along okay at school?”
“Hello, sunbaenim. So far it seems manageable.”
“When I was twenty, I whined about how hard school was so much that my mom nearly kicked me out. You’re so mature… Composition must have more assignments than vocal performance.”
“Ahaha……”
“That’s just because you’re lazy……”
“Whatever~ you got grades like a Korea University early-admission free pass, you have no right to talk about laziness.”
“Ugh, damn, that’s a ten-year-old story, how far are you going to tease me about it?”
“Well, that’s true, we’re in our thirties now. I feel so old.”
“Hyungs and unnies, please leave me out. I’m still in my twenties, a young person.”
“Hey, almost-thirty maknae. At a time like this you’re just old too. In front of a twenty-year-old hoobae, you dare claim twenty-nine is young?”
“Noona, the facts hurt a lot… If my bones break, your Nulwoul drummer will disappear!”
These insane, hyper-extroverted school sunbaenims were the four members of the band Nulwoul, including vocalist Jeong Woo-in.
Wow… I’m already drained.
How am I going to film this…
The <”Wait, is that her?”> strategy doesn’t apply to Joo Hyerin alone.
Ko Hyunseo, the center of the most talked-about stage of Dream Girls Project, “Bad Problem.” Hyun Jaei, revealed as the youngest in “PN Youth,” the public trainee project of major agency PN Ent. about three years ago. And so on.
A link that lets people connect the recognition they’d already earned with a current “Prove Rookies” member, and that content gets uploaded to the YouTube channel under the name RE:Prove.
One horizontal long-form video, shot at minutes-long length, and one vertical short-form video condensing just the highlights, at seconds-long length.
The short-form video, easy to watch casually, draws the public’s attention, and the long-form video, made for settling in to watch, meets the needs of core fans (or people who will become core fans).
Recreating one’s own performance from back when the public noticed it.
It’s simple, but a sure way to gather a lot of attention. Watching the growth of someone you already know is interesting, and new information on top of it is even more fun.
As an example, take Joo Hyerin’s RE:Prove, released today, the day right after the member reveal.
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【[RE:Prove] Skate with Hyerin😘 ‘The Nutcracker’】
- National team background really is different, how is this someone who took a year off ㄷㄷ
- I went all the way to Japan to see Hyerin live that season ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ I’m so glad to see Hyerin skate again like this, you’d better be happy……
- I don’t know figure skating but I can tell Hyerin’s movements (?) are really pretty lol so prettyyy♥♥♥
- Omg, the skater who did that Nutcracker pas de deux was Hyerin!!!! I just found out, wow
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The reaction is good.
Considering it’s only been about six hours since release… for a small-company trainee, the view count is really good.
I’m glad I handed the filming phone to Joo Hyerin’s friend back then.
Her friend, who got recruited on the spot after practice, did her absolute best to film while skating, and thanks to that the footage came out far prettier than the fixed-cam setup I’d expected. I really do owe that friend at least a coffee.
This one… is a bit of a waste to release now. Should I hold it until attention grows?
And there was one more video I’d filmed separately on my own phone.
“Wow! Unnie, look at this! I can still do a doubleee!”
“Ohhh, national team Joo Hyerin isn’t dead yet!”
“Whaat, I was only on the national team for one season, are you going to keep teasing me?! You’re the current national team member…”
“You know, unnie, my coach once said Hyerin could take a few years off and still just jump a double axel and a triple salchow, and it seems really true. Joo Hye! Just try the salchow too!”
“Triple? Can I…?!”
…A video of Joo Hyerin, who can still land a double axel.
Apparently that jump is what separates people who stay competitive from people who keep it as a hobby, according to Joo Hyerin’s friend.
After that, Joo Hyerin attempted the triple salchow a few times, and sure enough she landed that too. Her friend, a current national team skater, said things like “That insane talent monster…” so that says it all.
She waved with a laugh, saying triple jumps were probably all she could manage, and both her friend and I went, “You’ve already done everything, what do you mean you can’t?” She really is a funny kid…
Anyway, why am I bringing this up?
“Prep’s done~ Jion, Yunju, we’re ready on our side.”
“Filming’s set up too! Once you’re ready, Jion, we’ll do a mic sound check and start right away!”
“Oh, yes. I’ll be right there.”
I tossed the phone I was holding into a corner and stood in front of the mic stand.
Because I have to do RE:Prove content too…
Yunju told me, “Your original video passed three million views, so by numbers alone you’re next after Hyunseo, Jion,” and so I couldn’t get out of it either.
“Testing, testing, one two three. Could we run the intro for a sound check?”
As soon as I finished speaking, the drummer’s count-in rang out and the song’s intro began.
“—That’s enough, thank you. Yunju, could you raise the mic gain a little?”
“Is this okay?”
“Testing, testing. Yes, that should be just right.”
For the record, all of this is also being captured by cameras set up around the practice room.
Not for this content, but for behind-the-scenes footage later.
“Jion is a total pro!”
“I think I got used to it from taking ensemble classes at school. Thank you for the compliment.”
“Ahaha! Do you still get lots of ensemble assignments? In our day we got rolled so hard we couldn’t even sleep.”
“Noona, please, no more ‘back in my day.’”
“I’m trying to talk with my cute hoobae, and you’ve got something to say?”
After that, the Nulwoul members’ banter went on, and I just… smiled awkwardly.
How did it come to this… It’s because my RE:Prove content is a band club video.
While Yunju was clutching her head, agonizing over how to recreate it, Jeong Woo-in sunbaenim heard about it somewhere and said, “Should we do the session for you? In exchange, please grant us one favor.”
When I heard that and asked why, he said Nulwoul still has no hit song known to the public, and Jeong Woo-in wanted to use this chance to grab the public recognition they lacked.
“Honestly, indie bands aren’t very accessible, right? The company doesn’t do much for us, so we do our own promotion~ and busking~ but it’s getting cold… Our comeback is mid-November and it’ll be even colder, so busking is totally out. Then I heard our company’s idol team was doing their team reveal earlier than that.”
Jeong Woo-in looked at me for a moment after saying this. I wondered if I’d done something wrong, but that wasn’t it.
“I also heard about the content idea because I pestered the team lead nonstop. They said it was your idea, Jion? If I say ‘a talent I covet’ here, Team Lead Subin will chew me out, right? That’s not the point, anyway.”
…It seemed he just wanted to put me to use somewhere.
“I heard Team Lead Subin and Kim Yunju were agonizing over how to handle the session lately.”
“Ah… I mean, why did you offer to help our content first, sunbaenim… No, not that I don’t want it. I’m just really curious…”
“Hmm~ are you the type who doesn’t trust help without a reason? It’s because I think the idol team has much better mass appeal than we do. It’s not free session work, the condition is that you sing our new song and post it on our channel.”
Correction: he’d said he brought up the session thinking of using me.
“But sunbaenim, our promotional effect won’t be great either. We haven’t even debuted, and I’m not sure how much the team itself will be promoted…”
“Oh, I know that. I don’t expect one cover to do much promotion. But if you do well later, the video will circulate a lot, and even if you don’t, it’s a bet where we lose nothing, so I wanted to place it.”
Whether it works or not, there’s nothing to lose, so he wanted to bet on the chance that it works. That was the gist.
In other words… he’d looked at our team’s future value.
“And honestly, I’m kind of bored.”
“…Pardon?”
“We’re bored. We finished the album work… no schedules, no performances, and the time until our comeback is awkwardly long, and then I heard somewhere in the company they were looking for a session.”
“Ah.”
“You know, we’re people who make music when we work and make music when we play. Honestly, I just want to play.”
…Of course, I figured boredom was really the first reason.
Nulwoul must be a band made up of nothing but hyper-extroverts.
Right after the signal to begin the main shoot, the drummer’s count rang out.
And then the band sound filled the practice room.
Focus.
This time I’d better sing better than I did in high school!
