Chapter 496: Selecting a Venue

Chapter 496: Chapter 496: Selecting a Venue

The exclusive Disney studio used by the program team for long-term recording was just a conventional variety show recording booth with limited space, accommodating only hundreds of live audience members.

Its equipment and venue scale were completely inadequate to support a grand finale voting site on the scale of a thousand people.

To complete the public voting of a thousand people, build a top-tier finale stage, and hold up the grand finale face of this phenomenal variety show, it was necessary to completely change the venue and land in a large professional performing arts venue in downtown New York.

After finalising this core demand, Irene immediately arranged for dedicated liaisons from the program team to comprehensively screen indoor performing arts venues within New York City that met the competition specifications, possessed top-tier sound fields, professional stages, and matching schedules, conducting multi-layered filtering, one-on-one negotiations, and repeated comparisons.

As one of the core entertainment cities in the United States, New York possessed countless top-tier performing arts venues, and the selectable venue resources were extremely rich.

However, venues that suited the variety show audition grand finale, balanced professionalism and atmosphere, and met the restrictions on headcount and schedule conditions were few and far between.

Among them, the most prestigious and highest-priority primary venue was the Radio City Music Hall in New York, situated at Rockefeller Center on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue.

This music hall was a landmark performing arts venue in New York, enjoying a nationwide reputation and extremely high visibility.

It hosted pre-Grammy galas, major award ceremonies, top-tier concerts, and star-studded evening parties year-round, with hardware configurations hailed as industry top-tier.

The interior decoration of the venue was luxurious and exquisite, the stage layout was grand and orderly, and the sound field tuning had been professionally polished for decades.

With clear sound pickup, a three-dimensional sound field, and distinct layers, it perfectly matched the needs of vocal competition stages without issues like noise, echoes, or sound pickup imbalances, making it the optimal solution for holding the singing competition grand finale.

More importantly, this venue was massive in scale, with a standard capacity to hold six thousand audience members watching simultaneously.

With ample space, reasonable circulation lines, and complete security support, it could fully bear the program team’s thousand-person voting demand and even leave ample room for expansion.

In addition to Radio City Music Hall, the program team simultaneously locked onto two top-tier New York art venues as alternatives.

The first was David Geffen Hall at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

As a palatial venue for high art in New York, the stage hardware, sound field effects, and stage design equipment here all belonged to the industry ceiling level, regularly hosting high-specification high art performances such as symphonies, operas, and ballets, with an extremely high artistic tone.

But also precisely because of this, the venue operator’s positioning was extremely high-end, carrying a natural sense of superiority from the artistic circle.

They had always looked down upon emerging mass variety show auditions, believing that such entertainment variety shows were too vulgar and traffic-oriented, running counter to the venue’s high art positioning.

From the root, they refused rental cooperation for variety show activities, and directly declined the program team’s invitation in the early stages of negotiations, leaving completely no room for discussion.

The second was the David Koch Theater.

This theater was known for its unique and avant-garde architectural design, exquisite and delicate stage design, and top-tier lighting systems.

It regularly undertook performances such as modern dance, ballet, dramatic stage plays, and small concerts, with extremely strong stage adaptability and software/hardware configurations that fully met the standards.

The venue had a standard seating capacity of 2,700 seats, which was more than enough to meet the basic demands of thousand-person voting.

Moreover, the venue layout was compact, facilitating the program team in controlling audience order and coordinating on-site processes, resulting in a higher fault tolerance rate.

With the screening of the three core venues completed, the program team compiled all data, pros and cons, and negotiation progress into a booklet, simultaneously reporting it to Irene.

The David Koch Theater, which was originally the program team’s priority alternative, encountered a serious conflict during the final schedule check.

The theater had long undertaken a large-scale local drama tour event in New York, and its schedule for the entire month was fully booked, unable to spare a slot for the grand finale of The Voice, directly withdrawing from the alternative list.

The remaining David Geffen Hall held a firm attitude and refused cooperation, leaving the New York Radio City Music Hall as the only optimal solution.

After finalising the ultimate goal, Irene personally stepped forward to interface with the venue operators, taking the lead in launching multiple rounds of in-depth consultations and negotiations.

Relying on Echo Pictures’ past project reputation, Disney’s industry endorsement, and Irene’s own top-tier connections in Hollywood and the New York entertainment circle, Radio City Music Hall—originally with a tight schedule and scarce resources—finally relented, willing to adjust part of its schedule for this phenomenal variety show and clear out a complete recording slot for the grand finale.

The moment the venue was completely finalised, the heavy stone that had been hanging in the program team’s hearts for a long time finally fell to the ground.

Considering the venue’s massive scale of a full 6,000 seats and the core demand for public voting in the grand finale, Irene made the most reasonable scale adjustments combined with the program team’s staffing, security capabilities, and on-site control conditions.

She abandoned the ultimate expansion plan of a full 6,000 audience members to avoid various unexpected problems caused by excessive numbers leading to chaotic on-site order, voting statistical errors, security pressure overload, and loss of control over stage line-of-sight.

Precisely compromising, she fixed the number of live audience members for the grand finale at 4,000.

Four thousand live public audience members could completely widen the scale gap between ordinary variety shows and top-tier galas, creating a grand and enthusiastic stage atmosphere while maximising the restoration of public voting’s credibility and sense of ritual.

At the same time, the headcount was controllable and circulation lines were clear, facilitating unified scheduling by staff, all-around control by the security team, and precise statistics of voting data, balancing popularity and stability.

After the venue scale and audience headcount were all finalised, the program team immediately rushed to start nationwide preparation work, developing a simple online registration channel overnight and opening the public registration system for live audience members of the grand finale across American online platforms.

Unlike the past models of internal variety show audience invitations and ticket monopolies, the audience for this grand finale was open to ordinary citizens across the United States with zero threshold for registration.

Regardless of age, profession, or social circle, as long as they loved music and paid attention to the show, they could independently register to draw qualifications for watching the performance live.

The program team screened the 4,000 public audience members through random drawing, ensuring the randomness, universality, and mass nature of the audience group to the greatest extent, completely avoiding problems such as fan-controlled venues, cliquish social circles, and unfair vote counts.

Once this news was officially announced across the entire network, it instantly detonated American online public opinion.

You must know that although this season of The Voice was recorded throughout without real-time broadcasting, relying on a top-tier mentor lineup and unique competition format innovation, it had long accumulated massive popularity online.

Every round of elimination topics, trainee stage clips, and classic mentor interaction scenes could flood social platforms, year-round dominating the entertainment trending search lists across the United States.

Now, landing the grand finale in a top-tier New York landmark venue, opening thousands of public votes, and allowing free public registration for attendance was equivalent to forcibly playing out the momentum of an annual top-tier entertainment feast for the closing ceremony of a recorded variety show.

Countless netizens, music fans, and program viewers swarmed into the registration channel.

In a short period, the number of registrants broke hundreds of thousands, and online discussion popularity continued to soar, directly detonating network-wide traffic in advance for the unbroadcasted grand finale and thoroughly heating up the public opinion atmosphere of the closing schedule.

Irene’s move layout seemingly appeared to be a simple venue change and opening of audience registration, but in reality, it precisely grasped the traffic code of the era.

Under the premise of lacking real-time television broadcast support, relying on a super-large offline gala scale, public participation mode, and top-tier venue face, it forcefully created network topics and leveraged network-wide communication, allowing a recorded variety show to possess national popularity and a circle-breaking effect rivaling live broadcasts.

After all venue coordination, scale finalisation, audience registration, and gala preparation work were fully implemented and closed-loop, the urgent matters weighing on Irene’s heart were completely handled.

Freed from the entanglement of tedious trifles, she could finally unload all the work pressure of production, coordination, and layout, settle her mind, and as a pure audience member, sit securely in the VIP spectator seats at the semi-finals live site, fully focused on watching this peak duel of the top twelve breakthrough.