Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 224 Cover Song Contest Launched
It's not difficult to organize a cover song competition for "Mice Love Rice".

In the early days, many online singers used their own desktop computers and microphones costing only a few dozen yuan to record songs at home.

Because these are online songs and covers, people are extremely tolerant of poor sound quality.

The accompaniment was simple; Yang Chengang had a ready-made one, and he handed it over to Chen Cheng when copying the song. It could then be uploaded directly to the school's intranet for people to download and use.

So, without any delay, Chen Cheng released the specific rules for the first theme song cover competition on Renren.com on Friday.

The competition rules are as follows:

First of all, this cover song competition is a set theme competition. All contestants can only cover "Mice Love Rice". It is best to use the official accompaniment. If the singer has a preferred pitch, they can also compose their own music or play an instrument to sing.
Secondly, the competition for this cover song contest has three stages: preliminary round, semi-final, and final.

The rules for the preliminary round are as follows: Renren.com will recruit 500 public judges from across the network. These 500 judges will be randomly selected from the applicants. Each judge will receive a 1,000 yuan judging commission after completing all the scoring.

The competition adopted a scoring system, with 500 audience judges divided into groups of five. All entries were divided into 100 groups and submitted to the 500 audience judges for blind listening.

To prevent too many applicants and too many songs requiring public judging, Chen Cheng stipulated that there is no limit to the number of applicants for this competition, but there is a limit to the number of participants per session. The number of participants is 10,000, based on the time of submission.

In other words, during the preliminary rounds, each judging panel will listen to one hundred songs.

Of course, it's not necessary to listen to everything. Many contestants who sound bad can be given a low score and moved on to the next one. Just like during the Super Girl auditions, the judges could press the bell at any time to make the contestants stop singing. For example, that controversial female judge sometimes scolded the contestants and kicked them out in three seconds. So, this kind of quick screening doesn't require a lot of work.

The audience judges listened to the songs blindfolded, without seeing any information about the singers, and scored each song based entirely on their own preferences, with a maximum score of 100.

The final score for each song is the average score of the five audience judges.

After all the songs have been scored, only the top five songs from each group of judges will advance to the second round.

Five hundred songs were selected from one hundred groups to enter the semi-finals. In the semi-finals, the order of the five hundred songs was shuffled. The five hundred songs and the five hundred reviews were randomly divided into ten groups, and fifty songs in each group continued to be blind-listened and scored.

Of the fifty songs in each group, only the highest-ranked song can advance to the finals.

This means there are only ten spots in the finals.

At that time, the official team will announce the final scores and rankings of each participant, and announce the top ten ranked players.

The final round is also very simple. The school's intranet will set up a listening page, and all the top ten songs will be published for users to vote on. Each user can only cast one vote, so you can vote for whoever you like.

In other words, the final ranking depends entirely on public opinion.

This fully mimics the fan support voting mechanism of Super Girl, allowing users to participate more deeply. It is not only fairer, but also more effective in generating buzz and mobilizing user enthusiasm.

Within a specified time, the ranking from first to tenth place is determined based on the final number of votes, and then the awards are presented.

Chen Cheng was also quite generous with the bonus:

The first prize is 80,000 yuan.
Second place, prize money of 50,000 yuan;
Third place, prize money of 30,000 yuan;
The fourth to tenth place winners will each receive an encouragement award of 5,000 yuan.

Competition schedule: This Friday to next Friday is the registration and submission period for entries. Public jury registration will also take place during this period.

Next Friday to the Friday after next will be the time for blind listening comprehension scoring by the public judges for the preliminary and semi-final rounds;

The following week will be the voting period for users. After the voting ends, the top three will have the opportunity to travel to Jiangcheng to collect their rewards for free, with all travel expenses covered by Xiaonei.com.

After Chen Cheng shared this idea with his team members, they all joked that if they weren't tone-deaf, they would have participated in the competition as well.

It's 80,000 yuan after all!
This is an absolute fortune.

Chen Cheng knew the principle of "you can't catch a wolf without risking your cub," and if he wanted everyone to participate enthusiastically, the prize money had to be attractive. If investing hundreds of thousands of yuan could create a wave of cover versions of "Mice Love Rice" online, then the money would be well spent.

So, he had everyone develop pages for registration, uploading works, blind selection scoring, and public scoring, and then used the official account to send a message to the entire network.

Thanks to the nationwide popularity of the song "Mice Love Rice," Xiaonei.com has become one of the most popular internet products among young people, with its user base growing rapidly to tens of millions.

Internet blockbusters develop at an exponential rate. Deepseek, for example, became an overnight sensation and quickly became a globally sought-after AI product, with its fastest growth rate being over 60 million new downloads in a single week.

In the mobile internet era, the most difficult metric to scale is download numbers. However, with the potential to become a massive hit, it's possible to achieve 63 million new downloads in a single week. If it weren't for the malicious bans on DeepSeek downloads in many countries, a hundred million new downloads per week would be easily achievable. After Renren.com surpassed 10 million users, "Mice Love Rice" alone garnered 300 million views on the platform. Of course, this count doesn't exclude duplicates; if a user plays it 30 times a day, it's only counted as 30 views.

Many visitors who are not logged in also listen to "Mice Love Rice" on Renren.com because they remember the Renren.com photo album from the song, so finding the original version here is the easiest and most convenient way.

On Friday noon, the school's intranet officially announced the cover song event for "Mice Love Rice," which instantly attracted the attention of a large number of netizens.

Meanwhile, the accompaniment track is available for download.

The number of downloads exceeded 500,000 in just two hours, and this competition has undoubtedly become a hit again.

The entire Chinese internet community was amazed by the series of incredible moves made by Xiaonei.com.

No one expected that Renren.com would be so good at creating buzz with just a theme song. It was already a classic case of using minimal effort to achieve maximum effect. But what no one expected was that Renren.com's exploration of this hit song was not over yet. Instead, they quickly launched a cover song competition, and the first prize was a whopping 80,000 yuan.

To be fair, without Renren.com, it would be a pipe dream for Tencent to offer 800 QQ coins as the first prize in any competition at this stage.

Renren doesn't do these fancy things. Giving away virtual currency isn't a sign of sincerity; we just give money directly.

Is 80,000 a lot?
In Chen Cheng's opinion, it was not too much at all.

As a reborn individual, he knew that the internet was 30% technology and 70% operation. So why were there tens of thousands of private servers for the game back then, some of which couldn't even make enough to cover their electricity costs, while others made millions a month?

The technology is the same, the architecture and code are the same, the difference lies in the operation.

Chen Cheng wanted to do everything he could to create hype, attract the attention of the entire internet, and do his utmost to create a product miracle in the Chinese internet.
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The phenomenal success of "Mice Love Rice" caught the two of them completely off guard.

One is Liu Shiyu, who looks down on this song a million times, and the other is the original author, Yang Chengang.

Yang Chengang has been in a daze these past few days. He earned 110,000 yuan and originally planned to take a good vacation and have some fun in Shanghai. However, when he was walking on Jinling Road Pedestrian Street, ready to do some shopping, he found that several shops outside Jinling Road were also playing their own songs on their speakers. Not only were they playing from all directions, but the audio was also out of sync, making him feel as if he were in a space where dreams and reality overlapped, giving him a strong sense of unreality.

When he entered those clothing stores, he found that no matter which store he went into, they were basically playing his song "Mice Love Rice".

Moreover, it was the "school version" that I later re-recorded for Chen Cheng.

He never dreamed that the song he wrote last year, which he always felt was immature and somewhat embarrassing, would become a hit across China within days.

This filled him with immense regret. If he had known it would turn out like this, why did he even bother selling it? He might have become famous if he had just posted it online!
It's fine now.

When Chen Cheng uploaded this song to Renren.com, he only mentioned that it was the 2002 theme song for Renren.com, but he didn't say who wrote it or who sang it!
If he were to include his own name in the notes, he could at least gain some fame and let the whole country know that this song was written and sung by Yang Chengang.

Now look what's happened: the song has become a huge hit, but I haven't become famous at all.

However, having worked in the music industry for many years, he knew that a song's popularity depended mainly on how heavily it was promoted. Renren.com directly promoted his song as its theme song to millions of registered users, which was something that not everyone could do. If he had uploaded the song online, it might have been completely ignored.

Therefore, he had no intention of breaching the contract. He just felt that it would be good if Chen Cheng could give him his name on the contract, so that he could at least get some benefits.

So, as soon as he left the Baleno store, he called Chen Cheng.

When Chen Cheng received his call, he immediately said with a smile, "Brother Yang, I've made your song a hit!"

He started by bringing up the concept of "pushing the fire," because he was worried that the other person would come to him to complain.

Yang Chengang was much better than Lin Zhenbang. He smiled and said, "Oh, thank you so much, President Chen. I never dreamed that my song would become so popular!"

Chen Cheng laughed and said, "Brother Yang, you're too kind. After all, we've spent money, so we'll definitely do our best to promote it."

Yang Chengang could sense Chen Cheng's constant vigilance and defense, so he said somewhat embarrassedly, "Mr. Chen, I called mainly to ask you for a favor."

Chen Cheng smiled and said, "Brother Yang, you go ahead."

Yang Chengang said, "I hope you can credit me on Renren.com, as the lyricist, composer and singer. To be honest, I didn't expect this song to be so popular. I want to share in the success."

Yang Chengang spoke frankly, which left a good impression on Chen Cheng. So he readily said, "Brother Yang, I'm organizing a cover song competition on Renren.com today. How about this: when the competition starts, I'll reserve a judge's seat for you. We can take the opportunity to promote it and say that the original author and singer, Yang Chengang, is also one of the judges. This timely promotion will make it easier for people to remember you."

(End of this chapter)