With Li Keqin's wu Keyue winning the championship, the 10th anniversary finals of "The Voice of China 2021" came to an end.
As one of the longest-lived music variety shows in China, "The Voice" has reached its tenth year. From the birth of 2012 to the ten-year covenant of 2021, 1682 students have stepped onto the stage of "The Voice" and realized their musical dreams. Liang Bo, Zhang Bichen, Zhou Shen, Ji Kejunyi, Huang Xiaoyun and other musicians who have come out of the "good voice" are gradually becoming the backbone of today's Chinese music scene.
Looking back on this decade, all kinds of music variety shows have emerged in an endless stream, from popular to original to vertical niche music. In the ever-changing variety market, what kind of journey has "The Voice of China" gone through, and why can it achieve its tenth year? I believe that Jin Lei, the general director who has accompanied this IP for ten years, has the most right to speak.
<h1>For ten years, The Voice has continued to grow</h1>
At the beginning of the "The Voice" 10th Anniversary Finals, a memory kill was given to all the audience. Na Ying's "Little Second Class", Jay Chou's "Strongest Team on the Surface" and Yu Chengqing's "Harlem Team" past mentors and students brought a touching chorus, expressing the "Good Voice" in the past ten years, which has always been the same inheritance of dreams and original intentions.
In 2012, the premiere of "The Voice of China" ignited the enthusiasm and expectations of all the audiences who stood in front of the TV set that summer, and the program stripped away the excessive attention to the singer's appearance in the form of blind selection in the swivel chair, making the music variety show more focused on the charm of the sound itself.
Since then, from the iconic "Red Swivel Chair" to the "Mentor Chariot" to the "Magic Mirror Swivel Chair", from the "Song Single-Point Man" to the "One-Click Sealing Wheat", for ten years, each season of "The Voice" has tried to make a breakthrough in the format. The continuous self-iteration of content and form highlights the significance of "The Voice of China" to accompany and witness the Chinese music scene.
This year, the program has once again been upgraded in the competition format, setting up 4 tutors and 4 assistant teachers who came out of the good voice to form a "4+4" selection mode, adding different perspectives of two generations of musicians in musical aesthetics and vision, bringing new points of view to the program.
In Jin Lei's view, the exchange and collision between the mentor and the teaching assistant formed a dialogue between two generations of musicians, which is a very meaningful moment for this program that has reached the tenth year, "In the past nine years, many excellent musicians have come out of the stage of 'The Voice', and they are now rising to become the mainstay of Chinese pop music, so I think that the students who have returned to the stage with their own musical attitude and musical aesthetics in the tenth year are the moment of the reunion of the 'Good Voice' family." ”
At the same time, the "growth" of "The Voice of China" not only exists in the format, but also comes from the link of the players. Since the last season of the show, the age group of the contestants has gradually become younger, and the young singers after 95 account for a considerable proportion, and multiple music forms such as rap and band are more common.
The younger students brought many personality selections and stage performances, a Tibetan teenager from Lhasa, Cai Wang Luobu, an R&B song "Looks Good but Is Actually Good" interpreted the contradiction between the couples, which won the favor of the mentor Na Ying; the "Clockwork Moon" band composed of three young people brought a long-lost rock music experience to the audience with a moving song "It's Time To Say Goodbye"; and Yao Xiaotang's "Sun", The mood was bright and full, singing her unique understanding of the song, which was unanimously approved by 51 media judges.
The Voice of China's stage has always attracted many like-minded grassroots music lovers. But with the development of the Internet, it can be said that there is no shortage of stages for grassroots singers to show themselves, and they do not need to go through music variety shows to become popular, so why is the stage of "The Voice" still full of attraction?
In Jin Lei's view, the reason why there are still new players willing to walk on the stage of "Good Voice" in the tenth year is because from the premiere of the first season in 2012 to the present, the value core of the show has never changed, that is, it has always embraced the most vivid young people at the moment, "The program is like the spiritual paradise of the current young people, the main body of the first two seasons of the program players may be mostly after 85 and 90, and now that ten years have passed, many young people after 95 have participated. In the future, it may be that the children after 00 or even 05 will flock to this door, waiting to join this spiritual paradise. ”
<h1>Good works take time to settle</h1>
This year, a very big breakthrough in "The Voice of China" is that the content of original music has been greatly improved. In the list of the top 24 students in the country, 11 students have shown their original ability, blind selection stage, almost half of the songs are from the original of the students.
The fundamental reason for this change is that since last year, "The Voice of China" has added original tracks, encouraging young people to create more and innovate more, giving original musicians more opportunities to show and develop opportunities.
In fact, looking at the music variety shows in recent years, more or less are affected by the magic of "feelings", old songs and new songs, classic cover songs... It seems that it is not enough to sing the tears of the audience. According to some netizen statistics, on the stage of "I Am a Singer", Jacky Cheung's "Autumn Yinong" and "Love is Eternal" have been covered four times, and even "Ordinary Road", which is not much of an old song, has also been covered three times.
But in the consumption year after year, dozens of music variety shows have dug up the classic songs of the Chinese music scene. Nowadays, "cover old songs" in the eyes of many netizens, quite a bit of "eat the old book" meaning, the filter brought by the memory can be said to be few left.
"The main theme of 'The Voice' is to hope that the young people who are active and have musical dreams come to this stage to express themselves. Cover classics may be a way of expression, but the driving force and creativity of their inner desire for music is more important. Jin Lei told the film and television industry observation reporter. As a result, "The Voice" has breakthroughly added original tracks, so that more original music works are known to the audience.
This year, the number of creative students on the "Voice" stage has increased unprecedentedly, such as Yu Zibei from Guangdong, who won the praise of Li Ronghao and Li Keqin with an original Cantonese work "Scattering Prophecy"; Wang Jingwen, who became popular with short videos, has also been on the Weibo hot search list for many times with a number of original works. Whether it is a powerful response to the "emotional killing" or a commitment to discovering and delivering excellent original musicians for the Chinese music scene, we can see the determination of the program to further expand the connotation of the program.
But as there are more original works, new problems arise. Because many songs are meeting the audience for the first time, it is naturally difficult to compete with classic old songs, and the degree of out of the circle is naturally greatly reduced. Cover songs have the suspicion of "selling feelings", and it is difficult to immediately establish links with the audience when singing their own original works, so this music stage needs similar works?
For this question, Jin Lei said that "Good Voice" is a diverse and open stage, as long as it is a voice and work that can move you, it should be captured. At the same time, he also believes that original works have long-term vitality. He used the example of "Love That Never Loses" sung by Shan Yichun, the overall winner of the last season of "The Voice", during the blind selection. This original work, which was born in 2017, is precisely after three years of cover singing by many singers, that it finally received millions of hits on the short video platform, allowing more and more people to find resonance.
"We don't have to worry about how many clicks we must get at the moment, the works that are really careful always need to rely on time to prove, I hope that these excellent works can be cultivated on the stage of 'The Voice'." Jin Lei said, "I think we must let go of this original platform. Because more and more young people are actively writing lyrics and songs, and expressing their feelings and perceptions of life through their own works, this state I think is very worthy of encouragement. ”
<h1 id="da388">
How long will "The Voice" be done? I hope the longer the better!
</h1>
I remember at the launch conference of this season's "The Voice", mentor Wang Feng explained the reason why he insisted on joining the show: "Everyone thinks about what things can last for ten years, this is the reason why I stand here." "For a show, being able to go through ten years means the recognition of the market and the public."
"Dream stage", "high-quality music library"... These titles are the praise that the audience has given to the "good voice", and behind this is the program's adherence to the quality of the students and the perseverance of the original intention of the music. In the past ten years, "The Voice" has opened the door to the music hall for ordinary people and become a platform for many music lovers to communicate and exchange ideas.
But obviously, in the fiercely competitive variety market, the decade of "The Voice" has not gone easy. On the one hand, as an old "comprehensive N generation", it is facing the impact of many new programs; on the other hand, various programs such as rap, band, and electronic music have gradually occupied half of the music market, and the verticalization of music has become an inevitable trend, and "Good Voice" as a popular music program is facing great challenges.
In this regard, Jin Lei has his own ideas, he compares "The Voice" to the "Olympic Games" of musicians, which is the most diverse family, when a family develops to a certain scale, the soil is fertile enough, there is a possibility of making a vertical music program. "In the past four or five years, the vertical sound has developed vigorously, and the good voice has been very encouraging and embracing diverse musical styles since the first season, as the mentor Liu Huan once said, we can provide better nutrition and environment for niche music, from this point of view, 'Good Voice' seems to have played a role in fueling the waves." Jin Lei said.
The decade of "The Voice" has witnessed the dreams and persistence of countless ordinary people for music, and also witnessed the ups and downs of the variety market. To this day, "The Voice" seems to be not only a music program, but also a large platform with music as the carrier and dreams as the driving force, continuously delivering fresh blood to the Chinese music scene.
In recent years, almost every interview, Jin Lei, as the general director of the show, will be asked a question, that is, how long will "The Voice" be done? In his view, the development of Chinese pop music is actually only more than 30 years, just begun, many music genres are still developing, not to a mature state, every year there are still many musicians who love music, in the major music platforms to launch original music works, and "good voice" is rooted in such a soil.
"The question of how long we can handle it really tests our standards as a professional TV person or a media person." Jin Lei said, "In principle, 'The Voice' can be run all the time, but if it can be run for a few seasons, it can really be made into a high-level, deep-rooted program, in fact, it is more of a torture and encouragement for ourselves, and we hope that the longer the better." ”
— THE END —
Author | Li Yang
Editor-in-Chief | Peng Kan
Typography | Li Kexin