Chapter Forty-six: Put on Sale

  A father walked into a CD store in Chiba Prefecture with his five or six year old daughter.

  There were many other customers with them, and all of these customers would basically rush to the new single released this week at the first time. For music fans, everything that happened today will be a great event, because two popular singers Ayumi Hamasaki and Mai Kuraki will release their albums on the same day!

  Among the fans rushing to the new product area, it is clear that they are divided into two factions. In Ayumi Hamasaki's faction, there are more girls and some Harajuku-style dressed girls appear, while in Mai Kuraki's faction, there are more rock-and-roll youths and some... guys wearing glasses, looking a bit sly.

  Among such a crowd, the father leading his little daughter seemed somewhat out of place and it took him a while to finally enter the CD store. Looking at the new product area where people were crowded in front of the Komuro Mami and Hamasaki Ayumi shelves, the two had no choice but to look at other CDs on the side first.

  The father and daughter first picked out a few CDs by the Morning Musume girls, something his daughter had been wanting for a while. These idol groups are liked not only by adult men but also by young boys and girls. The pretty clothes and gentle older sisters are often these girls' first impression of idols, and many times it is this impression that gives them hope for the entertainment world and ultimately leads them to enter it themselves.

  Then his father picked out a few rock band songs he had liked since childhood, and when the two returned to the new product area again, they found that although the number of people in the new product area had decreased somewhat, it was still surrounded by a large crowd.

  "No choice, let's line up first and take a look at other CDs while we're at it." Dad said to his daughter.

  A father in his thirties and a little girl of five or six years old stand together near the shelves, queuing up. Their line of sight naturally falls on the CD rack beside them, but what they see is vastly different due to their height difference.

  At the angle that fathers see, they are all CDs deliberately placed by salespeople, the most popular ones. But for a five or six year old daughter, what she sees is basically CDs in corners that nobody pays attention to.

  After flipping through a few CDs, Father finally lost interest in finding the good ones. He looked over at his daughter and found that his precious little girl was staring intently at several CDs.

  The CD cover had a large yellow circle in the middle, which looked like an egg yolk. The yellow circle was surrounded by smaller circles of different colors, ranging from small to large, densely packed together. The image was simple, and my father understood it at a glance. The yellow circle in the middle represented the sun, while the smaller circles around it were the rays of light emanating from the sun. Alternatively, the central circle could also be interpreted as a stage, with the surrounding circles representing the audience gathered around the stage.

  Although the father can understand, his six-year-old daughter is unlikely to understand, but this does not mean that the little girl will not be interested in such a cover. In fact, if it were not for the bright and warm painting style that attracted the attention of the little girl, the person who would really not notice might be the father.

  "Zhou... Xiao?" Father picked up the CD and first whispered out the singer's name.

  I've never heard of it before, and it sounds like a Chinese person? Is it a Chinese song? I wonder if the father here finally saw the real name of the CD: "Little Love"?

  Well... ordinary... generally speaking, when a CD is produced, in addition to the singer's own popularity, it's also very important to attract purchases with its appearance, but this CD... the vector graphic cover is ordinary, the song names are ordinary, the singer's name is also ordinary, no promotion, no news, not even those intentionally exaggerated words that are often printed on CDs.

  It's simply enough to make you lose the desire to buy after reading it...

  But...

  "Do you want it?" her father asked, lowering his head to ask his daughter.

  A CD priced at 1050 yuan is considered to be the cheapest price. Generally speaking, there are only two possibilities for a CD to be sold at this price: one is that it is sold with a low profit margin in order to sell more, and the other is that the CD was not made well and therefore can only be sold at this price.

  But since his daughter likes it, even if she just likes the cover of this CD, her father will still buy it without hesitation. After all, it's just a thousand yuan, which is nothing to him.

  After queuing for over 10 minutes, the father and daughter finally bought Ayumi Hamasaki's and Mai Kuraki's singles and left the CD store. It is rare to see people like them who come to a CD store without a specific target in mind and buy several CDs of different styles and artists. Most people usually have their own targets when they come to a CD store, so they rarely pay attention to other CDs beyond their target. However, this father-daughter pair bought a CD by Zhou Xiao, which happened to be the only sale of Zhou Xiao's CD in that store for the entire week.

  After the father and daughter entered the house, the first thing they did was to divide up the CDs. The father chose the rock CDs, while the daughter took the remaining idol CDs. However, when it came to the CD with a vector graphic of Zhou Xiao, the father didn't immediately hand it over to his little daughter.

  "Do you want to listen?" Dad asked.

  "Listen!" said a lovely and endearing voice with a milky tone, belonging to his daughter.

  "Okay, let's take a listen." Dad opened the CD case. Actually, he wasn't really interested in his daughter's CDs, especially those of girl idols, which weren't his type. But this CD was unfamiliar, with songs by someone he had never heard of before. Dad felt it was his responsibility to help his daughter evaluate it, and if the songs on this CD weren't healthy, he would think of a way to get her to give up on it.

  Don't think that such things are rare, the simplest example, what was the debut song of the Little Cat Club? "Don't take off someone else's swimsuit!" In the 80s, they were already singing this kind of dirty song. Ask any father, and he probably wouldn't want his daughter to hear something like that, especially when she's only six years old.

  After opening the CD case, Father was disappointed at first because the workmanship of this CD was... a bit too poor, it was simply cutting corners to the extreme. In the situation where there was only one CD disc inside and nothing else, Father had not even listened to the song yet, but he was already half disappointed.

  After the CD was put into the player, the first thing that came through was a faint hiss of static from the recording.

  After listening to music for many years, my father, who has a very advanced player, shook his head as soon as he heard this sound. This CD was obviously not made with too much seriousness. The production of such noise is closely related to the recording studio and the quality of the master tape. It's clear that the company didn't grasp this aspect strictly.

  "Huh? It's still a product from Being Company? Is it outsourced? Or is it some rich second-generation amateur who paid for it out of their own pocket?" thought the father, flipping over the CD box and seeing the Being company logo on the back.

  Then, the music started playing.

  When Zhou Xiao first performed this song at the subway station, he used a guitar version, but this time with full accompaniment, he brought out the original Mongol800 version. So, the father and daughter surrounding the player first heard the low hum of the bass, accompanied by the bass sound, a male solo also joined in, you can feel that the man's voice is very young, his voice still has not faded away the youthful awkwardness, but such a young man, actually pressed the tone very low, as if whispering something.

  "...the blue planet in the universe... vast world..."

  "Hmm... the lyrics are quite healthy, and surprisingly it's even rock?" The father nodded secretly to himself. If the lyrics were like this, then perhaps this song was suitable for his daughter to listen to. However, would his daughter who had always liked pop music and idolized certain artists like this kind of rock? As he looked at his daughter, he found that she didn't seem to dislike it, but instead was moving her little head along with the beat.

  Then, the rhythmic drumbeats of the frame drum also blended in.

  "Wow…… the rhythm is really good......” His father raised an eyebrow, he didn't expect that such a simple and warm cover would hide a rock song. In the repetitive and intense melody, the boy's voice was still low, then as the music progressed, finally, the male voice also became high-pitched with the music.