Too Many Songs for the Regular Album
The filming for Do You Like Music? wrapped up completely. After yet another hellish long-haul flight, the production team landed back in Korea and disbanded on the spot at the airport. I climbed into the car with my manager, Kim Junhyung, behind the wheel and headed straight back to Always Orphanage.
“Oh! You’re back!”
“Yeah.”
Travel is travel, after all.
Which is to say, it’s fucking exhausting.
My body felt like it was screaming at me to get horizontal as fast as humanly possible, so I brushed off everyone trying to talk to me and collapsed straight into bed.
When I finally opened my eyes again after passing out from the journey fatigue, a full twenty hours had gone by.
After sleeping that long, there was only one thing I had to do…
“What else? I have to go to school.”
I headed to school to fulfill my duty as a student. The three weeks of complete disruption to my routine were over; I was returning to everyday life.
“Haaam…”
At this point, Blue Sky Entertainment only had two artists on its roster: Seo Siyeon and Blooming.
Lee Hajun possessed the two most talked-about figures in Korea right now, yet he surprisingly didn’t have much to do. Blooming had gone into closed-door training, claiming they needed to perfect their live performances, and practically lived in the practice room. Meanwhile, Seo Siyeon had shut herself away in the newly rented studio the moment Do You Like Music? filming ended, saying she was working on her album.
“……I’m sleepy.”
So Lee Hajun had nothing left to do.
Of course, all the basic preparations for Blooming’s comeback had already been completed—from the promotion strategy to the album cover and inclusions. He had done it to the point of exhaustion while managing Winter Girl, and now that money was no longer tight, he didn’t have to go around begging producers one by one.
As for Seo Siyeon… he had no idea when she would make her comeback, so there was nothing to prepare even if he wanted to. All he could do was turn down the flood of requests for her to appear on various variety shows.
In truth, the other Singer Star participants appeared on quite a lot of entertainment programs, but the two from Blue Sky Entertainment did not. It wasn’t that their president, Lee Hajun, was incompetent; it was simply their choice.
First of all, Blooming had decided to lean into a somewhat mysterious concept. Considering each member’s background, they judged that hiding their origins moderately and cultivating an air of mystery would be far more advantageous for building a dedicated fandom than revealing everything.
Information about Blooming’s parents was already scattered across the internet, and people had learned that the girls were essentially modern-day noble young ladies. With so much of their image already consumed through Singer Star, further television appearances were unnecessary.
And Seo Siyeon simply refused to come out because she was working on her album, so there was nothing he could do about it. The contract had stipulated from the start that the company would not interfere with an artist’s personal activities. Besides, you didn’t touch a musician while they were creating.
“Well, she’ll handle it.”
In Lee Hajun’s experience, there was no point worrying about geniuses. She would probably finish the work at some point and suddenly reappear. He had been confirming she was still alive every day, so if any real trouble came up, she would say something.
‘Now that I think about it, I haven’t contacted her today yet.’
I’ll have to do that soon.
While Lee Hajun was leisurely brewing coffee with nothing better to do—
“Mr. Hajun.”
Seo Siyeon suddenly burst into the office. Her face was expressionless, but she looked somewhere between tired and drained.
“I’ve finished selecting all the album tracks.”
It had only been three weeks since Do You Like Music? filming ended.
While Seo Siyeon had been completely immersed in album production, cutting herself off from all outside news, the editing for Do You Like Music? had reached the near-final stage in just two weeks. The main PD therefore decided not to drag things out and to air the edited episodes as quickly as possible.
‘No… why the hell is the comeback schedule so fast?’
It was because Saki from FYG—who had joined the program specifically to promote her solo track—was scheduled to make her comeback with that very song this week. The company had essentially pressured them with a request to release the filmed footage as soon as possible.
When a major corporation “asks” like that, it might as well be a threat. In any case, the powerless PD Joo Hanam had no choice but to swallow his tears and push the broadcast forward.
Honestly, airing it quickly wouldn’t cause any real problems, but it still left a bad taste in his mouth—like he had folded to pressure.
What Joo Hanam had focused on most during editing was, naturally, Seo Siyeon. The first episode heavily featured the scene where she took Jia, Saki, and Baek Yuyeon to a park on a rainy evening for an impromptu busking performance. The response had been very positive.
Above all, the YouTube upload of the stage after the broadcast received an incredible reaction. It surpassed three hundred thousand views in a single day. With a rating of 5.5 percent—which was remarkably high for a current variety show—Joo Hanam had already been confident of success and treated his staff to barbecue that night.
The next episode had also yielded plenty of great moments. Seo Siyeon’s rearranged versions of classic songs, along with live performances from various other artists, were more than enough to delight the audience’s ears.
‘Of course, we still have to pick and choose what makes it on air.’
Time constraints made it impossible to broadcast every single stage, so unaired performances usually ended up on YouTube. Seo Siyeon, however, was the exception. Even the sessions she participated in were crammed into the broadcast cut.
“Sigh. It’s such a shame we can’t use this properly…”
“Tell me about it. Even I got chills watching the raw footage…”
The next episode to air would cover the transition from Spain to Italy, including the new song Seo Siyeon had created while gazing at the stars outside the window. Joo Hanam had wanted to include both the process and the result in the program, but Blue Sky Entertainment’s request had forced him to remove nearly all of it.
They were worried it would count as a spoiler.
Since there was still plenty of time before release, the company’s sensitivity was understandable. Still, as a PD, it felt disappointing.
In the end, though, ratings were what mattered. Viewers saw Seo Siyeon surrounded by Jia, Saki, and Baek Yuyeon as nothing more than a beautiful girl with cute little kids, and that alone provided more than enough healing. The show was already pulling in overflowing ratings.
The YouTube clip views were performing even better than the previous season, so despite his regrets, Joo Hanam could only shrug and think, Well, these things happen.
“Yes!”
But it didn’t take long for Joo Hanam to cheer triumphantly. Blue Sky Entertainment had contacted him asking whether they could put back in the portion they had previously requested to remove.
“No one’s going home until this is finished today!”
“…Yes, sir.”
Of course, for the person actually doing the editing, it was the beginning of hellish overtime.
Working on a full album usually took anywhere from several months to well over a year. There were simply that many songs to create, and artists suffering from artistic pretension kept writing tracks only to scrap them for being “bad,” making it incredibly difficult to fill more than ten songs.
On top of that, attaching lyrics, shooting music videos, and planning the release schedule… it all ate up a massive amount of time.
“There are twelve tracks for the full album. Would you like to hear them?”
“…I’ll listen later. But how on earth did you finish this quickly?”
That speed couldn’t be explained away so simply… and then there were the lyrics on top of everything. That was no small task.
“I wrote some of the lyrics myself… but I entrusted most of them to lyricists.”
“Hmm? You did?”
Well, that was something she could do without going through the company anyway.
Still, he thought it might have been better to handle it officially through the company. Even so, she seemed to have found satisfactory lyrics remarkably fast.
“I gave every track to ten different lyricists and had each of them submit ten sets of lyrics, then picked the ones I liked best.”
“…Have you lost your mind?”
Just how much money had she spent?
Lee Hajun could feel his hands starting to tremble.
With the money used on that alone, they could have run the company for months…
“Ah. We have a lot of money now, don’t we?”
Come to think of it, Blue Sky Entertainment was no longer a company that had to scrape by and beg. It had transformed into one that had to figure out where to spend its overflowing funds.
“…Yes. It seems that way.”
Seo Siyeon stared at him with ice-cold eyes. For Lee Hajun, being looked at that way by an elementary-school girl stung more than a little.