Chapter 156: Do I Look Like a Sucker to You?

Chapter 156: Do I Look Like a Sucker to You?

Song Xuan had been played before.

Under her mother’s influence she had dreamed of music since she was small. Wu Yurong had always opposed the idea, but she had never forbidden her daughter from keeping music as a hobby.

Music was, after all, one of Wu Yurong’s own hobbies now.

At Donghai University Song Xuan studied business administration, following her mother’s arrangement. But she spent most of her free time on things connected to music.

She liked writing songs.

She wanted to be a singer.

Everyone at Donghai University knew it.

She had begun buying songs not long after enrolling. Donghai University had a music school, after all, with no shortage of students studying it professionally.

She wrote songs herself, too, and had uploaded some anonymously to the major online music platforms.

None of them had made any splash at all.

As for why she released anonymously—

She understood perfectly well that if she released music showing her face, or went into livestreaming, she would be popular very quickly.

She had never done it.

First, her family would not permit it.

Second, she did not want to become famous on the strength of her face.

She did not need the money.

Her love of music was pure.

It had nothing to do with money.

However famous a singer became, what they earned in an entire lifetime would still not exceed her family’s wealth.

She simply wanted to be a singer. She wanted the public to love her voice and her songs.

And she knew exactly how beautiful she was.

She understood that if a woman as beautiful as she showed her face, nobody would pay the slightest attention to whether the songs were any good. If she made it, people would say it was the face that had done it.

She did not want that.

Over the past two years she had released a good many songs and bought far more—thousands of submissions in all.

Far too many.

And because she was beautiful, far too many people wrote songs for her and tried to sell them to her.

Almost all of them men.

On the matter of buying songs, she had been “played with” more than once or twice.

Usually the real purpose was simply to get close to her. Someone would throw something together and bring it to her to sell. Some would not even ask for money and claimed they wanted to give it to her.

Song Xuan found it all extremely tiresome.

Those people were so boring.

But she had a mild temper, and had never lost it with anyone to their face over the matter.

Besides, nobody dared harass her too far.

At Donghai University she was the sort of girl even the rich young masters did not dare pursue.

The wealthier their families, the less they dared come near her, for fear of being misunderstood.

Because her mother, Wu Yurong, had put out word that Song Xuan was not to date while at university.

Anything could wait until after graduation.

Given Wu Yurong’s temperament and her methods, once she had said publicly that her daughter was forbidden to date during university, the sons of Donghai’s other wealthy houses were duly warned at home.

However beautiful Song Xuan was, they had better not chase her.

If Wu Yurong found out, there would be serious trouble.

And precisely because those rich, well-connected young masters dared not approach Song Xuan lightly, ordinary male students found both the courage and the pretext to try.

Wu Chen was still writing.

His pen moved extremely fast, and his handwriting was exceptionally fine.

At last—

“Done…” He set the pen down, looked up at Song Xuan, and handed the notebook across. “Take a look?”

Song Xuan already suspected he might be here to have fun with her.

But reaching a conclusion before examining the song would obviously be wrong.

So the doubt stayed in her heart, and out of politeness the sweet smile stayed on her face.

She took the notebook and began to read.

The lyrics were—

Very good.

The melody?

She tried humming it silently in her head.

Also very good.

The arrangement—

That was harder to judge. An arrangement had to be heard before you knew how it worked. On paper it was enormously complex and difficult to imagine, for better or worse.

“Not bad. Definitely workable. Better than most of the songs I’ve bought.” Song Xuan looked up at him with a smile.

She said only not bad—and then said it was better than most of what she had bought.

Which was, in fact, high praise.

If an ordinary person, or someone with only a passing grasp of music theory, looked at what Wu Chen had written, they would likely think the lyrics excellent. Hum the melody, glance at the arrangement, and they might well find it staggeringly impressive—dazzled without quite knowing why.

Because they did not understand enough.

The more someone understood, the less likely they were to react that way.

It was like a great many singers in Wu Chen’s previous life.

Before they made their names, they wrote their own songs—many of them—and tried to sell songs to established stars. They showed their work around, hoping to sell it, hoping for recognition.

And the other side would not even take the songs.

Some were dismissed as garbage.

In the end, unable to sell them, those writers chose to sing the songs themselves.

And then they exploded.

Famous beyond measure.

Some led an entire movement in popular music and became king-level figures in the industry.

That had genuinely happened.

But none of it could be used to condemn the people who had refused to buy, or to claim their judgment was poor.

That would be wrong.

Quite the reverse.

Those already established musicians truly did possess very high musical attainment.

And precisely because of that, they had written too many songs, seen too many lyrics and melodies, had too many people trying to sell them work. They had examined thousands upon thousands of newly written songs and listened to demos without end.

Among them were many they themselves believed excellent—which the public rejected on release and which failed utterly.

Successful music had never been something to be admired alone in private.

The creator had to love it.

The public had to love it too.

Otherwise it was a failure.

Song Xuan’s ear was still nowhere near a professional musician’s.

But over the past few years she really had bought and read far too many songs.

She had seen too much.

She had also come across songs she personally adored and felt certain would be hits.

Every one had ended the same way.

Complete failure.

Uploaded, and not a ripple.

So after those knocks, Song Xuan would no longer give any song the highest praise she had.

Her reaction fell entirely inside Wu Chen’s expectations.

He even knew what she was thinking at that moment.

“Buying it?” he asked directly, smiling.

“I’ll buy it.” No hesitation.

Any song she called not bad was one she would certainly buy. She had too much money to care. If she liked something, she bought it.

“How much can you offer?” Wu Chen asked.

“One thousand,” Song Xuan quoted at once.

It was not a low price.

There was no especially high barrier to entering the lyricist-composer trade. Composition demanded some professional knowledge; writing lyrics demanded none at all.

Anyone could write lyrics.

The only difference was whether they were good or bad.

Which meant far too many people crowded into the field.

Never mind ordinary people. Every year waves of graduates poured out of music schools across the country, and nearly all of them had tried writing songs and selling them. They emailed material to music companies, hoping for a sale.

And 99.9 percent of that work could not clear a music company’s first screening.

Music companies received vast quantities of such garbage songs every day.

Very few were ever chosen.

Which was why lyricists and composers as a class earned relatively little. The competition was simply too fierce.

When a music company bought the lyrics and melody of a song, the normal price might be five thousand yuan. Anything above ten thousand was already exceptional and vanishingly rare. Even professional lyricists and composers might make only tens of thousands for a song. Only a handful of creators with genuinely golden reputations made serious money, sometimes taking a share of revenue after release.

And Song Xuan, whatever her family, was a student.

Buying songs on campus, five hundred or a thousand yuan was the normal price.

“I did the arrangement as well,” Wu Chen reminded her, smiling.

“Then… two thousand?” Song Xuan thought a moment and raised her offer.

She genuinely did not care about money.

But she was not about to be a sucker either.

Wu Chen only smiled at her and said nothing.

“Three thousand?” She understood him, and raised it again.

“One hundred thousand,” Wu Chen said.

Song Xuan froze.

For a moment she thought she had misheard.

Then her eyes went wide and she stared at him, stunned.

She had not misheard.

There was no possibility of it.

Wu Chen had actually quoted one hundred thousand yuan.

Even established lyricists and composers could not command that.

“Senior, you… you really did come here just to have fun with me, didn’t you?” Song Xuan said at last, once she had recovered. “Do I look like a sucker to you?”