| Frost
"This is not the end, it's part of the journey."
On December 5, the limited girl group THE9, which had gone through a year and six months together, was officially disbanded, and when the group was formed, the debut program "Youth with You 2" was the hottest women's group talent show of the year, highlighting the prosperity of the talent show and the trainee market; when it was disbanded, the finals night of the direct teachers and disciples was "banned", and the draft and idol became a "forbidden word" in a sense and an identity certification that was avoided.
In 2018, with the launch of iQiyi's "Idol Trainee" and Tencent Video's "Creation 101", the new draft form opened the curtain, people came and went on the stage, capital, platforms, directors, and trainees joined, for many people, this is a hot emerging market, attracting entrants with different goals, and coexisting with the idol economy in a diversified form.
In the past four years, the peak and bleakness of the draft have been huge, but they are also fleeting. In 2021, this wave of drafts came to an end, and the group of "showmen" who were selected in the past four years entered the new content market with new identities, and the draft was left for internal entertainment, not only for showmen.
From the content form, economic model to the traffic format, the draft has gone, and the industry ecology changed by the draft is short-lived and shallow, and some are still continuing, waiting for change.
01
Fan economy, bad luck and bad luck
The source of everything is "shooting", which is the beginning of the draft to change the ecology of the whole industry.
Starting from nongfu Mountain Spring of "Idol Trainee", the talent show has created a new model of entertainment marketing, combining product sales with voting mechanisms, opening brand support channels for fans, and fans can use "water tickets" to vote for favorite players when they buy corresponding products, and use the voting rules to point directly to product sales. According to public information, during the broadcast of "Idol Trainee", the online sales of Nongfu Spring increased by 500 times. Master Kong's iced tea, the sponsoring brand of "Creation 101" next door, also benefited a lot.
Under the huge commercial value, this kind of investment marketing model has taken shape and continued, becoming a fixed stylized part of this type of program content. Since then, Mengniu has "monopolized" the overall crown right of the head draft, such as the three seasons of "Youth with You" crown Mengniu True Fruit Grain, the "Creation Camp" series of three seasons of the total crown Mengniu Pure Zhen Yogurt, borrowing the successful experience of "Super Girl" in the early years and the innate convenience advantage of beverage brand implantation of "milk tickets", Mengniu has become the "biggest winner" behind the four-year draft.
When the star-making model of "traffic evaluation value" occupied the mainstream position, a large number of data women and kryptonite bigwigs appeared, forming a fixed backup and data organization around the idol. In addition, the draft at that time also set off a vigorous wave of fundraising, which put the commercial value of the idol into rmb on the surface. For example, Cai Xukun raised more than 2 million yuan during the competition, and "Youth with You 2" had 490,000 people participating in the fundraising during the competition, with a total fundraising amount of 89 million, and apps such as Owhat and TaoKao, which provide fundraising channels for fans, poured out and harvested fan money at a very small cost through high handling fees.
And these third-party platforms are not only precarious stability, but also completely failed to fulfill the obligation of auditing and supervision, but these "flaws" were infinitely tolerated in the minds of fans who "protected idols", until Owhat exploded not long ago, many fan groups and loose fans could not be withdrawn, fans realized the inaction and danger of the platform, and denunciation broke out. A month later, the "Qinglang" operation officially began, and all fan support platforms, including Owhat, Taokau, and Super Star Rice Ball, were named and controlled.
Under the shell of the fan economy, there is the phenomenon of uncontrolled "inducing consumption" on some platforms, behind the bright and wonderful consumption figures, some gray and black industrial chains are dormant, ready to explode at any time. Earlier, the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the State Supervision Commission published a report entitled "Cutting off the Capital Chain Behind the Chaos in the Entertainment Circle", and Jiang Yu, a researcher at the Macro Department of the Development Research Center of the State Council, pointed out that the emergence of traffic stars and "rice circles" is accompanied by the development of China's cultural industry, and capital is inherently profit-seeking, and under the leadership of capital, platform capital, traffic stars, and "rice circle" culture have formed a complete chain of interests. In this chain of interests, platform capital is the leading force; traffic stars are selected by capital to perform in the foreground to induce "fans" to consume; "rice circle" culture is a consumer culture created by capital using the economic power it masters, which grabs economic benefits by influencing society, especially manipulating the consumption habits of teenagers, and even affects the social ideological and cultural atmosphere. Therefore, the relevant central departments have deployed measures such as prohibiting the consumption of "fans", strictly controlling the participation of minors, and standardizing the fund-raising of funds, which are completely timely and necessary.
The draft itself is no longer there, but the thousands of show people hatched from it over the years have poured into various fields of internal entertainment, allowing the power and influence of the fan economy to continue to expand indefinitely.
02
The "cultivation" market is expanding
Business is more than "star-making"
The predecessor of the show is mainly trainees, in addition to a few ordinary people, child stars and actors, the trainees support the "half of the sky" entered by the talent show personnel, corresponding to the emergence of countless trainee training companies.
In the talent show, each contestant will be marked with the name of the agency on the huge name tag and each subtitle with the name, and the names of 31 agencies will be revealed in the first year of "Idol Trainees" alone, and by the time of "Youth with You 2", it has grown to 46. Companies that mainly operate trainees, such as Kunyin Entertainment, Awakening Oriental, Mai Rui Entertainment, and Chenxing Entertainment, did not have a strong sense of existence in the industry before the program, because the players transported were outstanding in the program, and even the brokerage company also made a name.
Since then, the trainee training company has entered a red sea, and new companies have continued to pour in, but the companies that really have the resources and the strength to incubate serious trainees are only a minority, and a large number of companies are in the name of "signing trainees", making money by charging signing fees, registration fees, training fees and even termination fees, confusing the water in the market.
Previously, from time to time, there were cases where minors were cheated of money because they wanted to be trainees and wanted to debut, and it was difficult for trainees to terminate the contract after signing the contract, and the situation that was trapped by the sky-high termination fee and difficult to get out of the situation appeared in Cai Xukun, Wang Ziyi and other hot show people who had already come out.
Until the draft was stopped, this situation did not converge. Some time ago, Cai Zhengjie, a trainee who had participated in the draft, went to Beijing to work for BM because of "no job", and he responded through Weibo that he was asked by the company to compensate 5 million yuan because he wanted to terminate the contract. At the same time, he mentioned in the blog post that after participating in the talent show, he experienced a long waiting period without work, with a meager income and difficulty supporting daily life.
In the mixed market environment, the rights and interests of many trainees are difficult to be protected, and the enthusiasm of many brokerage companies for trainees is maintained before signing, and the disputes after signing are continuous, and it is difficult for trainees to get a reasonable response to the normal needs of their work.
In addition to the termination of the contract, the "training pit" of the brokerage company is also continuing, a street dance student revealed to Bone Duo that she just met an invitation from a more well-known brokerage company scout at the door of the dance club two days ago, inviting her to participate in the winter vacation "training camp" organized by the company, 15 days of cost 19800, and played the name of "bulletproof youth group, TFBOYS teacher" to attract her, saying that "this is the ceiling level nationwide", after she refused several times, the other party still did not give up, repeatedly invited to say "you come first, come and then say".
Through keyword search, this kind of training camp with high tuition fees exists in several trainee training companies, which is an important way for the company to make money, and the work income after the trainees signed the contract is not the main business form, and a group of bright "unemployed" has thus become a visible result of the four-year draft.
03
Both red and black have stagnated
The trainees hit the south wall in the pre-debut dilemma, while the debut team members who successfully qualified and entered the internal entertainment continued to suffer from the influence of the "draft" label in the seemingly vast industry, and at the same time, they also affected the industry content ecology through their own fan economic attributes.
Earlier, when Bone Duo interviewed an actor from a draft, he told about an encounter of his own, "When I just came out of the show, once I went to audition, I went in and sat inside to greet the director, and then said a lot, and the first thing he said was, 'Don't feel that you have some traffic, just feel that you are different, we will be fixed', it will feel like he doesn't like our identity like an idol, and at that moment I felt that the industry was indeed biased against us." ”
Screenwriter Wang Hailin published an article in September saying that the film and television drama creation in these years has fallen into the thinking of "only traffic theory", forming an unhealthy industry phenomenon, he will be "mediocre acting, relying on appearance and professional skills, lack of professional education of newcomer actors and rice circle control evaluation, tearing positions and other chaos" are blamed on the "platform these years launched by the talent show", although the traffic is not all show people, and the chaos in the industry is not all caused by the draft, but through Wang Hailin's article can be seen, In the minds of many people inside and outside the industry, the "draft" is indeed the first inducement that leads to the gradual impetuosity of the whole industry, and is a major source of the "rice circle" culture involved in the creation and production process of film and television dramas.
Under this impression, there is a huge gap between acting and show people that needs to be crossed.
The music field with a high degree of adaptation to artists is also "not immune". Business logic also pays more attention to the huge profits brought by fans under the "data theory" thinking, such as a person buying thousands of albums; the sales that can be seen everywhere, such as "eating less breakfast can buy more one" Remarks are spread everywhere, and the urgers are deeply convinced; until this year, Cai Xukun, the "representative of the show", also appeared on the cusp of the "credit song" controversy in the corner of the rice circle control. Corresponding to the wave of sales data that is higher than the wave, idol music is difficult to integrate into the lives of ordinary listeners, and so far, only "Calorie" from Rocket Girl 101 can be called a work out of the circle.
In September this year, QQ Music restricted the repurchase of albums/singles by purchased users, and some purchased users could no longer make purchases. In response to TechWeb, QQ Music did limit the number of digital albums purchased, and the albums that users have purchased will not be able to buy them repeatedly. After this news was confirmed, the situation in which an ID once bought an unlimited number of albums to hit sales became history.
In addition to music, magazines, endorsements, peripherals, concerts, Weibo forwards and comments have similar experiences, and the idol economy is deeply trapped in the dilemma of red and black traffic. But no one can deny that the localization of the 101 series draft also left something behind, which first brought unprecedented changes to the domestic idol industry, breaking the dominant position of Japanese and Korean idols in China, leveraging new idol economic formats, and tapping domestic local audiences. Idols are ultimately a business in the entertainment industry, and the four years of the draft, in addition to creating economic value, have indeed changed the fate of some people, and the idols themselves have no original sin. However, the idol economy is plagued by stubborn diseases, the rules of the game have been criticized, and the negative forms of behavior such as "idol", "draft" and "traffic" and "shooting" have been linked, and the domestic idol industry has been hit hard and eventually reached the end.
With the deepening of the "Clear Lang" action, the phenomenon of "traffic prevailing" is improving, and the chaos of the "rice circle" will gradually return to normal order with rectification. But where should a large number of unemployed showpers go? Live broadcast, retreat, wait for the company's arrangement, or change careers altogether. The bubble dissipated and the idol industry dream shattered.