Why bother writing songs? Fast forward to the "Don't Laugh Challenge"

Chapter 1: Without a DJ, how can the younger sister use your songs in a suggestive way?
(A heads-up before the author writes: This book will have some educational elements, rather than simply copying Fire Songs. The plot will take up a larger portion of the book, and the song selection will also serve the plot.)
"Stop, stop, stop! Your opening is too bland, there's nothing memorable about it."

In the large office, a balding, pot-bellied middle-aged man in a suit, a cigarette between his fingers, waved his hand impatiently.

Sitting opposite him, Xia Shen was holding his phone, his finger resting on the pause button of the music player on the screen.

He looked completely bewildered, blinked, and then weakly said, "Well... Director Chen, I actually think this intro design is quite good."

"What do you mean by 'because of smoking'? What nonsense are you talking about?"

The middle-aged man in the suit frowned slightly.

"It's just the prelude."

Xia Shen said.

Wait, how come this director doesn't even know his formal name?

"."

The silence was deafening.

Then the middle-aged man in the suit raised his voice a notch: "How could I not know? I'm just testing you, young man. I'm just seeing if your basic skills are solid."

You say your reasoning is good, then tell me about your thought process, and what makes it good?

"Um"

Xia Shen's eyes lit up, because this question made him feel that his opportunity had come.

After thinking for a moment, he said, "The intro to this song is wrong, it's the prelude."

"What? You think I don't understand?" Before Xia Shen could finish speaking, the middle-aged man in the suit waved his hand to interrupt: "Say the scientific name! I understand!"

After saying that, he raised his head and puffed out his chest with a hint of pride.

Xia Shen's lips twitched, but he continued, "I used E-flat major because this key itself has a warm and slightly melancholic quality, which matches the song's nostalgic tone. You'll see as you listen further. This song mainly emphasizes emotional tension. The stability of the Eb chord and the subsequent harmonic progressions create emotional tension. This is my first idea."

Then the second measure begins with temporary modulated chords, such as Ab7 in the second measure, briefly introducing the lowered VII, which is the color of DB major.

However, before he could finish speaking...

"Don't bother sending me all these girls, I just want to ask one question: where's the DJ?"

The middle-aged man in the suit interrupted the spellcasting.

"Um???"

Xia Shen tilted his head, his expression slightly tense, and slowly typed a question mark, as if he hadn't expected to hear such a bizarre question.

The middle-aged man in a suit said, "You didn't add any DJ elements to this song because you were smoking. How are internet celebrities going to dance to this song?"

"what?"

Xia Shen was stunned for a while before saying, "Director Chen, you mean adding EDM drum beats? Using electronic music techniques?"

He ultimately wisely refrained from saying: "Actually, DJing is a profession, not a genre of music."

"It doesn't matter, whether it's 'e' or not, none of that matters. It's all VIP now, understand? If there's no climax in these ten seconds, people will stop listening!"
Okay, okay, you can keep putting them in the back.

Director Chen waved his hand dismissively.

"Ok."

Xia Shen nodded quickly, then gently pressed the play button on his phone, and the demo started playing.

"The rain soaked the sky, it's ruined."

"Stop, stop, stop."

However, just like before, he was stopped by a wave before he could finish a single line.

"If you sing a sad love song and you don't slow it down by 0.8x, where will the atmosphere and the sense of fragmentation come from when other people use your song as background music in their short videos? How will they get data, and how will you get traffic?"

Director Chen questioned.

Xia Shen: "."

"Put it back later."

"Director Chen said."

This time, Xia Shen didn't say anything more, but silently pressed the play button again.

"The way you ruined it was very sophisticated. You said you didn't understand, so why did we hold hands at this time? I've dried it out."

"Tsk."

The familiar frown is back again.

This time, Xia Shen was quite experienced, and without waiting for the other party to speak, he paused the demo directly.

Sure enough, Director Chen frowned and said, "It's fine if you don't do DJing, and it's fine if you don't slow down the tempo, but there's a big problem with your verse. Why is it all just singing?"
What do you think? Rap! Hip-hop!

Sing a couple of lines at the beginning, and then you can start talking!
Yo, yo, check it out, understand?

"Um, I know about rap, and I've dabbled in it a bit. Actually, there's a rap part at the end of this song."

Xia Shen quickly explained.

"I don't care about that."

Director Chen raised his hand to block: "Who has the patience to listen to what you're singing later? If there aren't enough highlights after 10 seconds, people will have already scrolled away."

In that case, how can you guarantee the retention rate?

You need to put it at the beginning, to keep up with the times, understand?

What you sing isn't important, what matters is what you say!

"But this is a song, Director Chen, not a short video."

Xia Shen was also a little helpless.

However, the reply he received was: "I don't care about this or that, it makes no difference!"

This one sentence completely shut down everything Xia Shen wanted to say.

"Okay then, you wait for me to go back and work out the flow, and I'll put together a verse."

Xia Shen sighed.

However, Director Chen shook his head in disappointment: "Waiting for you? Forget it, your song has no memorable points, no trendiness, and your internet savvy is too dull."

Look at your song title, it's not up to standard either. It's such a long string of characters, who would even watch it? It doesn't even show up in the comments section of the short video.

Two or three words would be better, wouldn't they? Even if it's not called "Dried Silence," "Dried" would be fine, right?

How about "Silence"?

Or to put it simply, "Time"!
Aren't they all better than what you have now? People can see your song title at a glance, without having to wait for the scrolling screen. Nobody has the patience to watch your scrolling screen; they'll scroll away in a minute.

"Alright, send this demo to your company email, and that's it for today. Go home and wait for our notification, okay?"

"Okay."

What else could Xia Shen say? He could only smile bitterly.

In this day and age, no one can fail to understand what the so-called "go back and wait for notification" really means.

He could only stand up and slowly leave.

As he walked out of the office building's plaza, he looked up at the sun in the sky and squinted.

Although the surrounding area was bustling, with countless smartly dressed white-collar workers carrying laptop bags or holding coffee cups hurrying by, and deliverymen in yellow robes carrying stacks in their left hand and a bunch in their right, their heads tilted and phones clipped to their cheeks as they busied themselves.

Everyone was heading in the opposite direction from him, which made it even less likely that he would feel any joy after just hitting a wall.

Even though he was mentally prepared, he still couldn't help but sigh.

I shouldn't have had any hope after all.

He pursed his lips.

His name is Xia Shen, he is 22 years old, and he is an undergraduate student at a music academy in Shanghai, majoring in popular singing.

His grades are quite good, currently ranking in the top ten of the department, and he'll likely receive an 'Outstanding Graduate' award.

Actually, it wasn't easy for him to get to where he is today.

His family was not well-off, but he showed great musical talent from a young age. He also had a very rare perfect pitch, and for him, sight-reading and singing, which others had to practice hard, was as easy as eating and drinking.

He also harbored a dream of music, and fortunately, his family was supportive enough. With the full support of his family, he was admitted to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, one of the top ten music academies in China.

Originally, he was full of confidence, believing that with his outstanding talent and conditions in the small town, as well as his achievements, he would definitely become a good musician in the future.

You can also earn money to improve your family's life, buy your parents a bigger house, achieve financial freedom, and be respected.

However, reality gave him a harsh slap in the face.

His so-called talent might be considered good in a remote small town in Guangdong, but it's a rare find.

But in Shanghai, especially in places like the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, there are just too many talented people, like a swarm of locusts crossing a river. Talent is the least important condition for success.

The worst among these are relative pitches; absolute pitch, which is rare outside, is as worthless as radishes and cabbages at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

What really matters?
Money, family background, connections, resources.
He doesn't possess any of these qualities.

He once thought that musicians and the music industry should let their work speak for itself. If the work is good, that's the most important thing. As long as you can make good work, everything else is fine.

But reality slapped him hard in the face, just like now.

He glanced down at the demo on his phone screen; it was an MP3 file.

The demo only contains a filename: "Give Me a Song's Time".

The emergence of this song is actually quite bizarre.

It was an afternoon six months later, and he was walking down the street as usual, just like the sun rising as usual.

Then, at an ordinary intersection, he ran into a fully loaded dump truck.

The car was only centimeters away from him at the time; it was the closest he had ever come to death.

Even now, thinking back on it is enough to send chills down his spine.

Fortunately, not only did fate not take him away, but more importantly, he encountered a living Buddha. The driver twisted the steering wheel with all his might and drove the car into the flower bed, and he survived.

Then, starting from that day, Xia Shen, still shaken, spent several days recovering from the shock, only to discover that not only was he not dead, but he had also undergone some strange changes.

Some things appeared in his mind that were different from his original memories.

These memories went from being very vague at the beginning to gradually becoming more profound.

In the end, it was almost identical to his original memories, even more reliable, and he could recall them clearly and easily.

In my memory, there is a country that is similar to China, with a similar world situation, and even a similar history, only some details may be different. Of course, none of that matters. What matters most is that along with it come some completely different works of art, completely different from their world.

For Xia Shen, a music student, his first priority was naturally to focus all his attention on the musical works.

Xia Shen, being a modern young man who is well-versed in various online novels, spent some time developing a procrastination test, which mainly incorporated a meme from the internet.

The so-called dump truck, also known as the 'other world summoner', is a medium for traveling to another world.

He used to treat it as a joke, but now it seems there might be some truth to it. There was indeed a soul from another world that intended to enter his body, but he wasn't killed, which may have led to the visitor from another world only entering halfway.

I did retain some memories, but I haven't fully recovered.
Anyway, it sounded pretty weird, so he didn't tell anyone about it.

After six months of processing, he has almost completely emerged from the shadow of the past.

Just in time, he was about to graduate, so he used the memories in his mind.

It's kind of an experiment, after all, he was amazed by many musical works that didn't exist in their world.

In the eyes of a professional like him, they are masterpieces, and it would be a waste to leave them gathering dust.

So, after careful selection, he chose "Give Me a Song's Time" from among a vast array of fantasy works.

It's a top-notch piece in terms of arrangement, lyrics, and other aspects, and it suits him very well right now.

So he couldn't wait to take it to various record companies.

Originally, Xia Shen believed that with this top-tier song from another world, he would definitely be able to break through the barriers between different circles.

However.
The reality is that he encountered setbacks one after another with this song.

This is the eighth time I've been rejected.

The reasons he received were all very simple, just like the ones he had just heard.

'Bloody', 'troublesome', 'mediocre', 'useless'.

In short, his carefully selected, infallible masterpiece was denigrated as worthless.

Including Director Chen, these people said in an extremely confident tone: "A song like yours is destined not to be a hit, it won't be able to gain traction, signing you will only be a waste of the company's resources."

Chen, the director of Visual Effects Culture, whom he regarded as his last hope and final stop, bluntly stated: "Without a DJ, how can girls use your song to rubbish?"

Ironically, and without any attempt to conceal it, the other party, as the director of a record company, didn't even understand the most basic music theory and professional knowledge, such as what an Intro is, what a DJ is, or what EDM is. He simply used his so-called understanding to criticize him and then easily dismissed everything.

Forget it, I'll just make it myself.

Xia took a deep breath.

Want him to give up? That's impossible.

He still firmly believes in one statement to this day.

A work of art, in terms of quality, can become an invincible spear and a sharp blade that can overcome all obstacles!

At the same time, his phone rang.

This directly disrupted Xia Shen's divergent thinking.

He looked down and saw a short message that startled him.
(New author, new book uploaded, please support! *sobs*)

(End of this chapter)