Chapter 454: Fair Selection

Chapter 454: Chapter 454: Fair Selection

This was a crucial meeting that would determine the tone, recording rhythm, and audience perception of the entire season, tied directly to the execution of all subsequent rounds. No one dared to slack off or be negligent.

Irene Coppola sat at the head of the table. On the side of the conference room, a woman dressed in a capable professional suit stood quietly beside the whiteboard, ready to record the key points of the meeting at any time. She was Violet Taylor.

After completing the acquisition of the tier-two television station, Irene Coppola launched a re-evaluation and interview plan for all station employees.

The original television platform had a limited scale and insufficient resources, leading to overstaffed positions where many employees held a mentality of just coasting through their days. Irene Coppola simply made up her mind to clear out all the idlers who held positions without doing any work, retaining only down-to-earth, hard-working, and visionary practitioners.

Violet Taylor was just an ordinary intern producer within the station at the time. She had previously led a few small-scale character interview programs, but unfortunately, limited by the platform’s influence and promotional budget, she had never managed to produce any breakout, eye-catching works.

However, during the interview and communication, Irene Coppola found that she had a clear train of thought, was familiar with the complete production process of television programs, and possessed extremely strong execution skills, so she kept her in the team.

When Irene Coppola began conceiving and preparing The Voice, difficulties followed one after another. With Echo Pictures, New Era Records, Lucasfilm acquisition negotiations, and multiple theatrical film projects running simultaneously, Robert Smith had long coordinated capital and film-and-television projects.

His schedule was already saturated, making it utterly impossible for him to spare the energy to be deeply rooted at the variety show site for long periods to fully manage the new project.

It was also impossible for Irene Coppola to consume all her energy on the daily operations of a single variety show, so she urgently lacked a reliable project leader to undertake all the implementation work.

Just as she was pondering recruiting a senior variety show producer from outside, Violet took the initiative to find Irene Coppola, submitting a complete project execution plan and recommending herself to take over the overall coordination work of this brand-new music variety show.

Irene Coppola did not immediately hand over all authority, but instead set a probation period.

The answer paper handed in by Violet far exceeded expectations: coordinating the online registration across the entire network for up to three months, repeatedly negotiating cooperation terms with the management teams of the four mentors, and docking with the Disney broadcasting hall to finalise venue rentals and equipment scheduling—all sorts of miscellaneous matters, big and small, were handled cleanly and neatly.

Furthermore, for every arrangement issued by Irene Coppola, she would refine the execution plan, anticipate potential risks in advance, and provide alternative solutions, rarely making omissions.

After several months of grinding-in, Irene Coppola already had an idea in mind: once the show officially started recording, she would hand over all on-site execution leadership to Violet, retreating behind the scenes to control the top-level direction while leaving specific external communication, on-site dispatch, and process management entirely to her.

From then on, the daily coordination of the mentors, the docking with the Disney broadcasting hall management, and the dispatch of the production team would all have Violet as the contact person.

Pulling back her thoughts in a flash, after a brief initial meeting and grinding-in, Britney, Steve Winwood, Bonnie Raitt, and Kanye West—four musicians with vastly different styles—each took their seats with solemn expressions, officially kicking off the core recording process seminar for the first season and first round of The Voice.

Holding her notepad, Violet waited quietly, ready to undertake all subsequent implementation communication matters.

Calmly opening the complete set of program proposals with clear entries in her hands, the pages were densely marked with the competition rules, recording details, daily schedule, camera highlights, interactive speech norms, and emergency handling plans that she had spent months polishing and perfecting.

As the original designer and general planner of The Voice, she knew the core highlights and winning keys of this brand-new talent show model better than anyone else.

Unlike the current American talent shows flooded with appearance screening, scripted personas, and stage packaging, the core trump card of this variety show she created consisted of only two words: fairness.

Without any unnecessary preamble or polite chit-chat, Irene Coppola cut straight to the point. With a clear, steady, and well-organised voice, she explained the show’s most core, breakout, and distinguishing preliminary selection mode—the blind auditions—item by item to the four veteran musicians and cutting-edge benchmark mentors.

"The first round of preliminary selections for our show adopts a blind audition mechanism throughout. This is our core barrier that distinguishes us from American Idol and all other talent shows on the market." Looking up at the four of them, Irene Coppola patiently and meticulously broke down the rules,

"After the official recording begins, the host will take the stage first, completing a brief opening speech and introducing the four mentors one by one to drive the on-site atmosphere and ignite the audience’s enthusiasm.

Once the process is laid out, the four mentors will sit facing away from the stage collectively, strictly forbidden from turning their heads or glancing sideways throughout the entire process, completely shielding all visual information."

"All contestants will take the stage to sing alone, with the performance duration strictly controlled to one minute. During this one minute, the mentors’ sole criterion for judgment will only be the contestant’s voice, singing skills, timbre, emotional expression, and musical appeal. Based on your professional judgment, you can freely choose whether to turn around for the contestant."

Irene Coppola further refined the core rules, explaining every detail in place:

"When the one-minute singing countdown ends, if no mentor presses the turn-around button, the contestant is directly eliminated and misses out on subsequent rounds.

If one or more mentors turn around, the contestant obtains advancement qualifications and simultaneously gains the right to reversely choose a mentor, ultimately deciding whose team to join, receiving one-on-one guidance from their exclusive mentor, and entering the subsequent team PK stage.

Throughout the entire process before the mentor turns around, it is strictly forbidden to look at the contestant’s appearance, height, outfit, or looks, putting an end to all beauty bias, physical stereotypes, and body discrimination, determining victory or defeat purely by voice."

This unprecedented blind audition mechanism made the eyes of the four heavyweight figures in the music industry present light up one after another.

Steve Winwood, who had deeply cultivated rock and blues for decades, took the lead in nodding in praise, his tone filled with emotion:

"Today’s talent show market is too impetuous; cameras chase after good looks, and scripts package personas. Too many amateurs with solid singing skills and unique timbres do not even have the opportunity to showcase themselves simply because of their ordinary appearance and plain figures. The most precious part of this set of rules is that it guards the purest essence of music."

Bonnie Raitt also expressed deep agreement: "The music industry has never lacked pretty skins; what it lacks are voices with true spirituality, singing skills, and stories. Abandoning visual judgment and listening only to the voice tests the contestant’s hard strength even more, and also tests our professional judgment as mentors even more."

Even Kanye West, who had always been unorthodox and free-thinking, had bright eyes, full of extreme interest in this competition system.

He had always loathed the superficial looks-first rules prevailing in the entertainment industry, and hip-hop music itself placed greater emphasis on attitude, rhythm, and vocal texture. This mode of stripping away all external filters and speaking solely by voice happened to hit his aesthetic sweet spot, instantly maximising his expectations for this variety show.

As for Britney, being Irene’s close friend, she was the person among the four mentors who was most clear about the entire program’s process and centre. Just the reverse selection alone had broken the barriers of all selection programs on the market, and she could not wait to know who her first student under her name would be.