Author: Wei Zhong
On the evening of August 5, the veteran music variety show “The Voice of China 2022”, which has reached its 11th year, won the first real-time viewership rating of satellite TV.
Compared with the old-fashioned music show such as “The Voice of China”, the reality show part of the song show is less, and it mainly promotes songs.Graphics: Feng Xiaoyu
And just recently, a number of video website platforms have also announced that they will launch their own song-playing programs: “The Heartbeat Stage”, “Chaoyang Playing Song Center”, “100% Open Mic”, “The Best Stage”… It’s worth it What is concerned is that these programs, without exception, use full-opening Maizhen singing as a selling point. Industry insiders believe that this approach has a good starting point, which will help improve the performance level of artists and establish a more scientific music evaluation system, which meets the expectations of the audience for singers, but also tests people’s acceptance of real singing. Without any modification, if the actual performance is not satisfactory, it may lose the audience. And this is the dilemma faced by music variety shows.
True singing should be justified, but now it has become a rarity
Not long ago, an artist’s “no stage” remarks aroused heated discussions among netizens, and directly pushed the topic to the hot search. Fortunately, at the same time, a large wave of music variety shows were officially announced. For example, Tencent Video’s “Heartbeat Stage” claims to produce a stage matrix with 100 super-long broadcasts; Youku will use several singers in the “Happy Restart” program as the team to create the “Chaoyang Song Center” program. It is said that it will play songs uninterruptedly throughout the year; and Mango TV’s “100% Open Mic” even shouted the slogan “Don’t sell miserably, don’t cheat, fully open the wheat”, so that the new generation of musicians “open the wheat to welcome the music”. Challenge”; Blockbuster TV is also planning “The Best Stage”. For a time, song-playing shows became the new focus of the variety show market in the second half of the year, and they were all emphasizing full-opening Maizhen singing.
Maybe people will wonder: shouldn’t singing really be a matter of course for artists? The reality is not so. “I opened the microphone and sang it by myself. My partner is not only the sound pad, but I also have to harmonize for her, because all the big brothers are sitting below.” Singer Mao Buyi talked about himself and the Internet celebrity in the “Mao Xuewang” program The strange phenomenon when the singers cooperated on the stage, the singers Lu Hu and Zhang Yuan, who were sitting on the side, also laughed knowingly: “I have also had it, I have also had it.”
Not only Internet celebrity singers, but many streaming artists released their new music albums, while being “slaughtered” on the music platform list, while being “unpleasant” by netizens on the hot search. These works with amazing sales cannot be sung by the public, and even the traffic artists themselves rarely dare to sing without pads. On Bilibili, Douyin and other platforms where netizens are active in their secondary creation, videos such as “Quankai Mai Singing Stage” and “Comparison of Singers and Internet Red Singers” have a considerable number of broadcasts. For a time, “dare to sing” seemed to be a rarity. In this context, the song-playing program that claims to be fully open to the microphone is expected by many netizens.
Will domestic audiences really accept Quankai Mai singing?
The so-called “playing songs” is to let singers sing their own songs in music programs, and then promote their own works to the public. In areas with relatively mature entertainment markets, there are well-known song-fighting programs, which are highly authoritative and have a long life cycle. For example, the Korean music program “Inkigayo” invites singers to sing in the form of live broadcast. It has continued since its launch in 1991 and has been watched by a large number of audiences every week; “Music Bank”, which was launched in 1998, has been carefully produced for many years. It not only introduces excellent works to the public, but also becomes an important reference standard for evaluating the level of music; and Japan’s “Music Station” has been broadcast as early as 1986, and it still has a stable high audience rating. Many audiences are looking forward to the emergence of a classic and authoritative singing show in China.
A phenomenon worth pondering is that although the voices calling for Quankai Mai to sing are quite high on the Internet, there are also many viewers who criticize the later sound modification and dislike the performance of the real singing. For example, at the Jiangsu Satellite TV New Year’s Eve Gala in 2021, the female singing group Hard Candy Girls 303 performed a singing and dancing performance with full open wheat and no sound modification, and received mixed reviews. Quite a number of audiences expressed their appreciation for their real singing performance, and many insiders, including the director of the party, also praised their courage and ability; but due to the nervousness of individual members when performing, some audience members complained: “It’s better to listen to them than to listen to them. Ugly real singing, I would rather choose nice fake singing.”
In fact, there have also been some song-playing programs in China before, such as “Chinese Music Billboard”, but the results are not satisfactory. Song shows need a lot of excellent and mature artists and works to fill, but mature artists also need a lot of stage experience to accumulate, the problem of “the chicken or the egg” is quite tricky.
It is also worth discussing how high the audience’s expectation of the artist’s true singing level is. For now, audiences who have strict requirements for real stage singing are more “hardcore” and relatively niche; while more audiences are more concerned about whether the show is good, and market feedback shows that they have a high tolerance for later-stage sound-editing shows. high. This means that the honest and true singing performance is likely to be defeated by those programs that are later modified because of the effect of the program. In the face of the market, the industry will wait and see whether the newly emerging sing-song programs can maintain long-term concentration and focus, and whether they can cultivate an audience group that has a relatively high tolerance for flaws in real singing. (Weizhong)
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责编：崔益明 ]