"Core Tips"
A variety show that has disappeared for nearly four years has come back to life and become a hot topic among the whole people, what does it rely on?
#我是歌手2024 ##那英#
Author | Gao Yuzhe
Edit | Liu Yang
The explosive "Singer 2024" set off the first national heat wave this summer.
The top stream of music variety, which has been silent for four years, returned with the courage of "live broadcast without repairing sound", allowing the dull Friday to reproduce the long-lost grand occasion of "all people watching variety shows", and easily won the ratings crown on the day of the premiere.
In the first live broadcast on May 10, the singers on the stage fought fiercely, and the audience threw out hot stalks that were more amazing than the competition: "Yehenaraying Fifty-year-old Lady Guarding the Country", "Fighting against foreigners is the fate of Yehenara's Clan", "Strawberry Music Festival vs. Grammy"...... Faced with the crushing of foreign singers, the whole people substituted for Naying. On May 13, singer Han Hong responded to the audience's call to ask for a battle on Weibo, bringing the show to a new round of climax.
"Singer", which announced its farewell four years ago, achieved a perfect reboot in the first live broadcast. According to the data of Hunan Satellite TV's official Weibo on the evening of May 11, as of that day, the program had received a total of 1352 hot searches on the whole network, 142 hot searches on the main Weibo list, and 34 topic words on the top 1 of the main Weibo list, with more than 7.3 billion transmissions on the whole network. As of the close of trading on May 13, the stock price rose 11.69%, and the market value soared by nearly 5 billion overnight.
Before the arrival of the next Friday, the popularity of the show continues, and waves of social topics are formed under the impetus of enthusiastic viewers and self-media creators. Why does "Singer 2024" hit people's hearts, and can it bring the public back to the era of big music comprehensive?
1. The beginning is hot, and the whole people support it
"Summer is coming, and I can do it again."
On April 15, 5 months after the break, the official Weibo of Hunan Satellite TV singer slowly announced the return of "Singer 2024" with this sentence. The seemingly simple opening remarks set off a lot of waves in the music complex and the audience with limited popularity.
As the ceiling of the internal entertainment music variety, before the show was broadcast, it triggered all kinds of speculations about the form of competition and the invitation of singers. American female singer Taylor Swift and ROSE from South Korean BLACKPINK are all on the list of expectations, and of course, singer Na Young is also very popular.
With years of word-of-mouth support, it is not difficult to imagine the popularity of "Singer", but the chain reaction triggered like a bombshell on the first day of broadcasting still exceeded the public's expectations. On the night of the show's broadcast, a number of related hot searches dominated Weibo, in addition to "singer live broadcast" and "Yingzi War", "singer rejection list" also caused heated discussions.
This is also the key to revitalizing the music comprehensive of the new program, in the case of general sound repair in domestic entertainment, the returning "Singer" broke the filter of the music comprehensive, and challenged the live singing in the form of "live broadcast without sound repair", restoring the authenticity of this kind of program.
A few days before the show was broadcast, director Hong Xiao said that many singers were politely rejected during the invitation process, because "the live broadcast must meet the three major elements of strength, courage, and singer schedule, and there are very few singers who can come to the stage", even Na Ying "kept dreaming of her car accident scene", and she even joked that she had prepared two bottles of quick-acting heart pills just in case.
If "live broadcast" is one of the reasons for the popularity of "Singer", the other reason is full of drama and randomness. According to the operation of the series, foreign singers will be invited every season, and this time American female singer Chanté Moore (Chanté Moore), Canadian post-00s singer Faouzia (Fancia), and five Chinese singers such as Na Ying, Wang Sulong, Rainie Yang, Second-hand Rose, and Hella Amu were invited.
As soon as the guest lineup came out, it caused controversy on the Internet, after all, the two foreign singers are not well-known, and only Na Ying seems to be able to play among the five domestic singers. Unexpectedly, the controversial lineup created a huge dramatic conflict, when the two foreign players easily crushed the audience, the audience outside the court ran for the "Pentecostal Naying" and sought rescue, so that this music comprehensive quickly evolved into a breakthrough match with national participation.
Under the national entertainment, few people remember the regrettable exit of "Singer" four years ago. This phenomenal variety show that has been started since 2013 has been in decline in the last few seasons, and Maoyan Professional Edition data shows that the number of Mango TV broadcasts on the second day of "Singer 2019" was 106 million, and the number of broadcasts on the second day of "Singer: The Year of Dangda" in 2020 was only 34.59 million.
At that time, in the face of boiling rumors, in the final season of "Singer 2020", the then chief director Hong Tao confirmed the end of the series. Now, the stagnant "Singer" has returned again, detonating again under the transmission chain of live broadcast and national memes, which can't help but make people nostalgic for the once lively era of big music comprehensives.
2. Is the music comprehensive back to the golden age?
The last time it triggered a national upsurge was "Sister Lang" Wang Xinling two years ago.
When the song "Love You" sounded, Wang Xinling, who wore a ponytail and a campus uniform, pulled everyone back to his youth.
Since then, major variety shows seem to have entered a bottleneck period. The good news is that in the second quarter of 2024, long video platforms, which are more eager to break through than the audience, have led the return of ace music comprehensives.
On the afternoon of April 26, at the Mango Four Platform Investment Promotion, four high-profile variety shows of "Singer 2024", "The Sound of Life", "Time Concert" and "Overcoming Thorns 4" were recommended. After a 3-year absence, "New Rap 2024" produced by iQiyi will be broadcast on May 4.
Previously, Wang Xinling's popularity, 0713 men's group "reemployment", etc., seemed to have made the long video platform find the traffic password of combining the "new and old". Judging from the upcoming audio variety show, in the third quarter of "Overcoming Thorns 4", the highlight of Mango's publicity is the confrontation between the seniors and the juniors; The returning "Time Concert" will invite five seasons of Supergirl to compete on the same stage.
A number of programs are about to meet the audience, but it is not known whether the enthusiasm of the public can be ignited.
Time has passed, and it is far from the era of music synthesis with the participation of the whole people. In the summer of 2004, "Super Girl" made by Hunan Satellite TV became popular all over the country as soon as it was broadcast, and this veteran music variety show brought fire to Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang and other "Super Girl" one after another, and became the youth memory of a generation. After 2012, "The Voice of China" and "I Am a Singer" appeared one after another, creating a golden age of music comprehensive with the old with the new.
On August 25, 2023, the twelfth season of "The Voice of China 2023", which only aired four episodes, announced that it would stop broadcasting. Since then, in the music variety market, there are fewer and fewer "old" music variety programs, and more niche programs such as "The Summer of the Band" and "The Sound of Endless Treasure Island Season" have undertaken some traffic in the short term, but it is difficult to stir up a bigger splash.
Nowadays, there are continuous programs in the music variety market, but these programs are difficult to affect the public's nerves. The reason may be that from the creation of the draft competition system by "Super Men and Super Women", to the old and new campaigns such as "The Voice of China" and "I Am a Singer", similar programs have gradually become patterned and lack new ideas.
In addition to the competition system, in terms of music quality and content, most of the singers of the "Singer" series in the past were Han Hong, Coco Li, Liu Huan and other powerful singers of the older generation, while the new generation of singers is developing in the direction of "idols", and the singer in the last season of "Singer: The Year of Dangda" is Hua Chenyu, and the Douban score of this season has also dropped to 4.9 points.
Please immobile celebrities and new idols who can't bear the traffic, so that high-quality music variety programs are gradually declining. Now, the explosion of the new season of "Singer" means that as long as you have the courage to innovate, the classic music complex still has the possibility of turning around. When a large number of classic music complexes return, it may be time to "reorganize".
3. How to create a popular sound comprehensive?
Although major platforms have made great efforts in the development of hardcore dramas and new variety shows, the strong emergence of short videos has diverted the attention of most users, and more time-consuming long videos are no longer the first choice to kill time.
Explosive style has become the key to breaking the dilemma.
Taking "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves" launched on Mango TV in 2020 as an example, on the first day of its launch on June 12, the share price of Mango Supermedia rose sharply, and its market value exceeded 131.5 billion yuan on July 13, 2020, catching up with iQiyi, the head of the industry.
According to Morketing's statistics, there are 13 brand sponsorships in the first episode of "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves", involving beauty, food, education, technology and other fields, ranking first in the advertising volume of similar programs. According to the open source securities research report, the sponsorship advertising revenue in this quarter may be in the range of 364 million yuan to 546 million yuan.
The huge commercial value confirms the potential of explosive models to drive revenue. After the show was broadcast, other long video platforms followed up one after another, and soon after, iQiyi officially announced a variety show called "Worthy of Sister"; In the same year, Tencent launched "Creation Camp 2020", Youku launched "The Name of Youth" and other similar variety shows, but unfortunately the popularity failed to surpass "Sister Riding the Wind and Waves".
Although the popularity of "Sister Lang" is not as popular as before, the major long video platforms still spare no effort to create popular models.
From last year's "Hurricane", "Three-Body Problem", "The Long Season" to "Flowers" at the beginning of this year, the long video platform has made great efforts on the content side. According to Tencent Holdings' announcement in the first quarter of 2024, "Flowers", "Ice Hunting" and "Perfect World Season 4" drove the number of paid members of Tencent Video to increase by 8% year-on-year to 116 million.
There are popular dramas on several major platforms in hand, but strangely, there are not many variety shows out of the circle.
Mango's currently airing big variety show IP "Riding the Wind 2024" is in an interesting contrast with the big hit "Singer 2024". The former almost covers the representative elements of the current variety show trend, exquisite choreography, popular music, and the strict body management of stars like idols, but the popularity has continued to decline so far, and there are no out-of-the-circle characters and topics. In comparison, "Singer 2024", which does not repair the sound and goes over and over again, is back to the top.
In fact, under the requirements of the pursuit of perfection in the variety show market, most of the programs that have been over-packaged have gradually deviated from their original intentions and deviated from the audience's aesthetics. Last year, iQiyi's "Let's Farm the Land" and Tencent Video's "Let's Go Now" became the only two new variety shows that entered the TOP10 effective broadcast of online variety shows.
This is also the reason why "Singer 2024" detonated, I am used to seeing too much praise of "brother half-open mic", and only truth will resonate. If you want to create a popular variety show, the long video platform must first return to the original intention of content.