Free Web NovelIn America, there are record labels commonly called the Big Three.
Three giants who control the music industry not only in America, but across the entire world.
Among them, Universal Music Group was known as the best of the three and the number one record label in the world.
"North America and Europe. Now it’s Asia."
Universal Music Group’s recent interest was the Asian market.
Japan, which now held second place in the global music market after America, and Korea, which clearly had a smaller market size than other countries but still exerted high influence across Asia as a whole.
And beyond that, China, a market so large it couldn’t even be expressed with the word “big,” and Southeast Asia, a market expected to grow in the future.
At some point, because the music industry had been stagnating due to the absence of superstars, all major record labels shared the view that the market that could upgrade the music industry by one step was in Asia.
However—
"Different, way too different."
If targeting the Asian market were that easy, record labels wouldn’t be racking their brains over it.
A singer who was explosively popular in America and Europe would go to Asia and most people wouldn’t even know the name, and on the other side, even if a singer who hit big in Asia tried to enter North America or Europe, the current situation was that people didn’t even care.
Universal Music Group’s Asia branch head, Anderson, found this situation difficult.
The group was clearly paying attention and supporting it, and Anderson personally had been making efforts to target the Asian market, but it was too closed off, you could say.
Especially in Japan, which you could call the most important market in Asia, Uni, a Japanese company and one of America’s Big Three record labels, had a tight grip, so it was hard to break in.
"Western music, what are you talking about! Let’s love Chinese music!"
China’s market was so closed that not only was it hard to enter, it was even hard to book visiting performances for their signed artists.
And if they looked only at far-future growth potential and went all-in on Southeast Asia, the current situation was that profitability was too low.
In many ways, it was an overall deadlock.
"Hoo··· I should at least go for a walk."
Universal Music Group had its branch in New York, even if it was the Asia branch.
To calm his complicated feelings, Anderson thought he should go take a walk in Central Park near the company.
High prices, congested traffic, unstable public safety.
Anderson could list New York’s bad points endlessly, but even so, one of the reasons New York was lovable was Central Park.
The free and beautiful scenery was unbelievable for a park inside a city, and it had the power to lead people into another world, making it perfect for a walk when your head was complicated like now.
So Anderson left the company, holding a cup of coffee, and headed for Central Park.
‘Is there some kind of performance going on?’
As always, Central Park was crowded with people who came out to have fun, people like Anderson who came for a brief walk, and foreign tourists.
But separately from that, there was a plaza where an unusually large number of people were gathering today.
Normally, Anderson would have taken a detour because he hated noisy crowds, but today, for some reason, he went closer to check what was going on.
♬
Then music reached his ears.
‘Hybrid pop?’
A typical hybrid pop melody, with intense drums and guitar and synth sounds added in.
Hybrid pop, a mix of EDM and pop that was popular back in the 2000s, was characterized less as a genre and more as a texture-driven style that actively used autotune and sampling.
A genre that once gained mainstream popularity because it gave easy-to-listen pop melodies a different feeling than pop.
But as if proving that no genre stays in fashion forever, it was also a genre that had long since been pushed out of the mainstream by hip-hop.
‘It even makes me nostalgic.’
Anderson, who hadn’t heard hybrid pop in a long time, felt nostalgic too, but separately from that, he could tell the melody he was hearing now wasn’t exactly the same as the old hybrid pop.
Something a little more trendy.
Like a twentieth-century old car that had a new engine inside, maybe?
Interested, Anderson pushed through the crowd and headed closer toward the stage where the song was coming from.
"Asian?" freewēbnoveℓ.com
The word “Asian” slipped out of Anderson’s mouth without him meaning to, and at the same time, the people around him shot sharp looks at him.
‘Damn.’
Racism was one of the most common things in America, but if you made it obvious, it went beyond being uncivilized and got you hated.
Even if he had absolutely no such intention, from the outside it didn’t look that way, so Anderson waved his hands to show he didn’t mean it like that.
And separate from that gesture, Anderson’s gaze was fixed on the Asians—no, the seven girls standing on the makeshift stage.
‘Is it K-pop?’
Teenagers. Girls who looked like they definitely wouldn’t be past their early twenties, even considering the distinctly youthful look many East Asians had, singing onstage.
At first, Anderson thought they were Japanese, but after seeing them dancing fiercely while singing live onstage, Anderson realized they were Korean idols.
Korea, and K-pop.
In America, it wasn’t even a minor genre yet, but in Asia, it was a different story.
"There are two agencies in that tiny country that make over 300 billion won in revenue?"
Compared to Japan and China, Korea was a very small market.
But what Western record labels paid attention to was their growth power and revenue.
Korean agencies, which you could call small-scale to the point of being mom-and-pop compared to them, bringing in revenue that was absurd for their size.
Even more surprising was that the revenue was rising exponentially every year.
And in the base of those Korean agencies’ revenue, there were idols.
A band that dances and sings.
In America, there was a legendary boy band called "New Kids on the Block" that dominated the era from the 80s into the early 90s.
Even before them, there were singers influenced by Michael Jackson who danced and sang alone on stage, but they were the first to have a whole band of members dancing and singing together.
The impact was enormous.
Who could have predicted that members with different individual charms dancing and singing onstage would become that unbelievably popular?
Even after they broke up, their influence sparked what people called an “idol” boy band craze in North America and Europe for a while.
But as always, like the moon rises when the sun sets, trends faded, and now in America, you couldn’t even find the shadow of idols.
Men hated even Justin Bieber, saying he looked gay, and American idols were too old-fashioned to satisfy women.
But idols survived.
Not in America, but in Korea, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
(Oh) The moment our eyes met
(Yeah) Like the world stopped for a second
A heartbeat that wasn’t in the plan
This moment is vivid
Korean lyrics he couldn’t understand, with short English words mixed in here and there, reached his ears.
It was one of K-pop’s defining traits.
And at the same time, unbelievably synchronized group choreography. Some people hated it so much they called them machines that dance and sing, not artists, but—
If they saw, right in front of them, idols moving like one body, they wouldn’t be able to say that so easily.
If you thought about why New Kids on the Block became popular, it was obvious.
Performance.
Would Elvis Presley, who used to be called the king of rock and roll, still be talked about to this day if he was just good at singing?
Stage manners and performance that surpassed skill.
That was what made Elvis Presley a legend, and the same was true for Michael Jackson, who was later called the king of pop.
People no longer wanted to be satisfied by only listening. They wanted to be fulfilled visually too.
That was dance, and especially group choreography, not one person dancing alone—group choreography had a bewitching, magical power that could enchant people.
"Who are those singers?"
"How are they singing while dancing that intensely?"
"Wow··· that part just now, someone that young sang it like that."
Even just looking at the people around Anderson, it was like that.
Even though it was an unfamiliar language, some people were unconsciously excited and sang along, and others held up their smartphones to film the stage.
And some people shouted loud cheers while watching the stage.
Considering how cold New Yorkers were—cold enough that if they weren’t interested, they wouldn’t spare even one second of attention—it was a rare sight.
And it was the same for Anderson.
He’d come out for a walk just to cool his head, got pulled along by the crowd, and ended up seeing a stage by chance.
Anderson had seen countless stages by top American singers famous enough to be called the best of the best, so it was extremely rare for him to feel moved by a stage.
But—
‘It’s completely different from watching it on video!’
Right now, he could only stare blankly at the stage.
Intense choreography. A melody that reinterpreted hybrid pop in a modern way. And K-pop idols who performed it perfectly.
A stage where those three elements formed a harmonious trinity was something even Anderson was experiencing for the first time.
Especially, his eyes kept going to each member onstage.
‘They’re overflowing with confidence···.’
The first mistake foreign artists made when they came to America was clumsily imitating American music because they wanted to “work” in America.
But in Anderson’s eyes, that was a foolish choice.
‘If that’s what you’re going to do, you might as well just listen to American singers.’
Instead, like the ones performing onstage right now, it looked far better to do it proudly in their own country’s language.
As if proving that, even though the audience gathered here didn’t know Korean well, weren’t they getting excited and singing along, even if clumsily?
Clearly, a song this energetic and bright was full of a positive feeling you couldn’t easily find in recent American music, so it felt extremely fresh.
‘Who are they?’
Since being assigned as the Asia branch head, Anderson had studied K-pop idols too in order to target the market, but he’d never seen a girl group like this back then.
Anxious they might finish the stage and vanish, Anderson—but as if someone understood his feelings—
After the song ended, one member, still panting, stepped forward without letting go of the mic.
A girl with long black hair and blue eyes so clear you could see them even from far away.
She clearly looked young, but her already-complete looks, paired with the warm sunlight pouring into Central Park, made her look like she was glowing with a halo.
"We’re Iam! Please listen to our songs a lot in America too!!!"
"Iam?"
And the girl’s voice, promoting her group, sounded clear even though her English was clumsy.
People around them hurriedly searched Iam on their smartphones.
***
"That stage needed a few more songs."
"Seriously. It’s a shame the songs we can sing abroad are limited."
Only after we finished the stage and went into the tent set up at one side of the plaza did it finally feel like we could breathe.
Singing on a stage hastily set up in an open plaza with no shade on a hot summer day had filled my body with heat.
‘I didn’t notice while I was on stage, but now that I’m down, it’s hot.’
The guerrilla performance, the last schedule in New York, started early in the morning.
"Come watch the performance!"
It started with the filming crew handing out flyers they made to people passing by on New York streets, and then it continued into Central Park, with me and the members continuing the promotional activity.
At first,
"Will people even gather?"
"In Korea, maybe, but in America, nobody will know us."
Even while we promoted hard, we wondered if people would gather, but in the end, at least a few hundred people showed up, and we were able to wrap it up as a successful guerrilla performance.
Of course, it wasn’t a few hundred from the start.
Even though we promoted that hard, at first, only about twenty people gathered at the stage location at most.
Because of that, Raon PD and the filming team discussed with serious expressions whether they should cancel the performance, but since at least twenty people had come to watch, they started the stage, saying we should perform and if it didn’t work out, they could edit it later. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
"They said it was a Korean singer, so I thought it was the guy who sang 'Gangnam Style'—what was it, 'Myeongdong Style'?"
Even those first twenty audience members had gathered because they mistook us for a famous Korean male singer who had swept the world a few years ago.
But once we started singing, they looked surprised, pulled out their smartphones one by one to film, and created a lively, excited atmosphere.
And drawn by those twenty audience members, more and more people gradually started gathering.
Before we knew it, by the ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) time we finished the stage, a few hundred people had crowded in, and it looked like a fairly believable performance—people even started singing along and copying our choreography.
Thanks to that, it was good that we didn’t perform to an empty stage, but once we finished the stage, I was full of regret.
"It would’ve been nice if we could’ve done the new song too."
Ryu Ayeon voiced her regret about not being able to show the new song, like she felt the same regret I did.
"Hold it in. We’ll have another chance to show it."
"Yes."
We performed a total of five songs at this guerrilla performance.
Spotlight and Bang! Bang! Love!, which we’d practiced and sung countless times since Agbaek. And lastly, our debut song, Something Feels Like It’s About to Start—those three group songs, plus solo stages from Seo Ryujin and Yuri.
"First, raising the mood is important, so early on, use upbeat songs as much as possible to draw people’s attention, and in the middle, let Ryujin and Yuri show their skill with solo stages."
Since we had to pick songs that would work in front of American audiences who didn’t know us, it was an unavoidable choice.
Our new song "DON’T BLINK" was absolutely forbidden because it still couldn’t be revealed.
Up until we went on stage, I understood, and I thought three songs might be enough, but now that the audience’s reaction was good, and I wondered if we’d ever do a guerrilla performance in America like this again, it was a shame.
"Ugh! Now it’s finally over."
While we were talking about our regret over not being able to show more on stage, Lee Gahyeon’s relieved voice came through.
"I miss Korea!"
"At first it was just good being abroad, but still, I like Korea best."
"When we get back, I’m eating kimchi stew first."
"I want Korean food too."
But separate from the regret, once we finished even the last schedule well, the members started one by one expressing how much they missed Korea.
‘Hm··· I’m not sick of this yet?’
Unlike the members who said they missed Korean food and wanted to go back quickly, I didn’t miss Korean food yet.
To me, Korean food meant Madam Sukja’s cooking.
But separate from food, I wanted to go back to Korea too.
After going on stage today, I felt it again.
‘Yeah. I really do like being on stage in front of people.’
After promotions ended, I kept singing and dancing endlessly in the practice room, but I’d felt like something wasn’t being filled.
Today’s performance made me realize it.
So many people looking at me and the members, cheering, smiling happily.
That was the part I’d been missing even while I practiced.
"Later, I want to do a concert overseas sometime."
"A concert?"
"Yeah. Filling it up completely with just our album songs."
"You think doing a concert is easy? We haven’t even done a domestic concert yet."
Seo Ryujin, who had to throw cold water on my words, said that.
"Tsk tsk."
"What’s with that rude tongue-click?"
"Your dream is small, Seo Ryujin. Even when Liu Bei was selling straw mats, he still dreamed of the peace of the whole realm. That kind of careless thinking is the kind of thinking that guy Cao would do."
"What?"
"We’re going to release this new song, and then the next album too, gather even more fans, and we’re going to do a concert."
Everything I said I’d do, even from my past life, came true.
Coming back to Korea this time, releasing a new album, and defeating both LYNX and VYNNIA who were coming back with us, and ruling the whole realm.
That was what we were going to do.
