Chapter 455: A Massive Number of Players

Chapter 455: Chapter 455: A Massive Number of Players

After the four mentors basically understood the blind audition rules, Irene smoothly expanded on it, revealing to everyone the program’s terrifying contestant reserve base this season, which was also her greatest confidence in daring to create a pure voice-based talent show, daring to benchmark against and even crush veteran talent variety shows.

Different from the traditional registration model of "American Idol" with offline auditions, targeted recruitment, and circle-based selections, "The Voice" closely followed the communication trends of the new era internet since the very beginning of its preparation, fully online-izing and universalising the registration channels.

As early as 2004, the production team had already started nationwide pre-heating online, relying on Facebook’s massive user base and communication capabilities, opening a three-month universal registration channel with no threshold, no circles, and no regional restrictions, opening its doors to all amateurs across America who loved music and possessed vocal talent.

And precisely because of the program’s ultimate fairness concept of "not looking at faces, not looking at appearance, not looking at educational background, not looking at background, only looking at the voice", it completely broke the registration barriers of traditional talent shows and ignited the participation enthusiasm of ordinary people across America.

With the three-month registration cycle coming to an end, the total online registration number directly broke through the 100,000 mark, which was a full two times the number of registrations for "American Idol" during the same period.

One hundred thousand amateurs signing up on the same stage and a massive contestant reserve meant that the program possessed an infinite talent screening base, and also meant that the starting point of this variety show far exceeded all similar competing products.

However, such a huge registration volume could not all enter the New York Disney studio to participate in on-site recording; there was neither sufficient recording duration nor matching venues and manpower energy, so the production team set up a multi-layered, rigorous, step-by-step elimination mechanism to screen truly good voices from the source.

At the beginning of the nationwide online registration, the production team set a hard registration threshold: all registering contestants must simultaneously upload an a cappella recording of no less than thirty seconds in duration, with no instrumental modification allowed, no post-production pitch correction allowed, and no mixing processing allowed, recording the original sound throughout to restore the truest vocal conditions to the maximum extent.

The professional judge team responsible for the first round of audio screening, discerning singing skills, judging the pros and cons of timbres, and screening musical talent was not externally hired personnel, but all came from the record company newly forged in partnership by Irene and Britney — NEW ERA Records.

This newly established record company gathered a crowd of outstanding American music producers, vocal mentors, arrangement masters, and sound engineers.

The team’s professionalism was top-notch, their aesthetics were advanced, and their vision was sharp, having deeply cultivated the vocal field for many years, making them extremely adept at excavating unpolished, supremely talented pristine voices from massive amateur sounds.

Having them take full charge of the first round of screening completely eliminated favour tickets, connection tickets, and traffic tickets, ensuring the absolute fairness and professionalism of the auditions.

The elimination rate of the first round of audio screening can be called extremely rigorous, directly brushing away 99% of the registered contestants.

Out of 100,000 registrants, relying solely on a thirty-second a cappella snippet, amateurs with weak singing skills, ordinary timbres, unstable rhythms, no spiritual flair, and purely following the trend to sign up were eliminated, ultimately leaving only about a thousand high-quality contestants with unique voices, solid singing skills, and musical talent to enter the next round of re-examinations.

Even after screening out a thousand high-quality audio sources, the production team still did not relax their audit standards.

In order to put an end to the chaotic phenomena of substitute singing, proxy recording, and forgery common in entertainment industry talent shows, and to ensure that every contestant’s voice was their genuine standard, the production team opened the second round video re-examination segment.

All contestants advancing to the second round had to open a real-time video connection according to official requirements, with no editing throughout, no pausing, no accompaniment, and no pitch correction, singing designated passage tracks a cappella on the spot, to be video-verified and real-time discriminated one by one by the producer team of NEW ERA Records.

This round of re-examination indeed checked out a large number of opportunistic registrants; quite a few people relied on professional singers to record audio on their behalf to register, vainly attempting to muddle through, only to reveal their true colours during the real-time video a cappella verification process and be directly eliminated and weeded out by the production team.

After two rounds of rigorous screening, the remaining contestants were all high-quality amateurs with genuine voices, hard-hitting singing skills, and zero moisture.

Combining multiple dimensions such as timbre uniqueness, musical style adaptability, voice recognisability, and emotional infectivity, the production team selected the best among the best layer by layer, and finally settled on two hundred official studio recording contestants from the thousand re-examination contestants, forming the complete competition lineup for the first season of "The Voice."

Most crucially, to ensure the absolute fairness of the blind audition segment, the production team strictly kept all contestant data confidential from the four mentors throughout the process.

The names, appearances, ages, musical styles, backgrounds, and past experiences of the two hundred advancing contestants were completely shielded from the mentors.

Before turning around in the blind auditions, the four mentors knew nothing about the contestants, and all judgments relied entirely on the one-minute live singing performance on the spot, preserving the core charm and suspense of the program’s competition system to the greatest extent.

Only Irene, as the general producer of the program, held the complete list of two hundred contestants and detailed information, knowing clearly each contestant’s vocal characteristics, musical style direction, and talent ceiling.

When she finished browsing through the information of all the participating contestants one by one and listening to everyone’s live re-examination recordings, even she could not help but feel a shock in her heart: it was impossible for this show not to become popular, and these selection clips would definitely be dug up year after year by those singer fans in the future.

You must know that hidden within this seemingly ordinary amateur contestant list were too many powerhouse singers who would dominate the future music scene, win Grammys, sweep across America, and become globally popular.

Right now, they were still obscure and unknown, merely ordinary music enthusiasts hanging out in the streets, bars, campuses, and small cities, or stumbling forward in the dark within music companies without meeting a discerning judge, lacking resources, lacking packaging, and lacking exposure channels, having their talent and radiance buried by ordinary life.

But Irene clearly knew that these people only lacked a top-tier stage to be seen by the public, and lacked a fair opportunity to showcase themselves.

And "The Voice" happened to become the best springboard for them to achieve fame in a single battle.

Holding such a luxurious, highly potential, and gold-content-filled contestant lineup, this variety show was destined not to be mediocre from its birth, and explosive popularity was the only outcome.

Inside the conference room, Irene explained the complete screening process, contestant reserve advantages, and core highlights of the competition system one by one, and the four mentors were completely enlightened after hearing it.

The ultra-high registration base, the extremely rigorous screening system, the purely fair competition system rules, and the unlimited potential contestant lineup, coupled with the blessing of four cross-track top mentors, gathered favourable timing, geographical advantages, and human harmony completely together.

In the next few days, the two hundred high-quality contestants screened layer by layer from across America rushed to New York one after another from various states and cities in the United States, arriving around the Disney studio to check into uniformly arranged contestant apartments.

The production team carried out preparation work such as contestant sign-in, information re-verification, pre-match rehearsal, vocal fine-tuning, and stage adaptation in an orderly manner, with all processes proceeding steadily and in an orderly fashion.

The stage art modification, equipment debugging, camera position rehearsal, and sound effect adaptation work inside the studio also fully entered the final stages, and the complete recording system was thoroughly formed, ready to start official recording at any time.

Only the last five days remained until the official broadcasting and recording of the first season of "The Voice."

Standing in the centre of the brand-new, magnificent, and grand studio hall, looking at the neatly positioned mentor swivel chairs, the brilliantly lit new stage, the busy and orderly staff, and the young contestants arriving one after another with burning eyes and harbouring musical dreams, Irene’s eyes were full of anticipation.

A variety show storm that would subvert the layout of American variety shows, rewrite the output mode of new artists in the music scene, and ignite a nationwide viewership craze was already poised for action, waiting only for five days later to officially draw back the grand curtain.