Chapter 605: Emperor Zhou is Invincible, I Submit

The next day, Zhou Yi was woken up by Qian Jiang.

His head feeling slightly foggy, he opened his eyes and looked up at him in confusion: "What's wrong?"

"It's 12 o'clock. How much did you drink last night?"

Qian Jiang, holding up his wrist to show off his big Rolex and pointing at the hands on it, said with a mix of helplessness and laughter: "Aren't you afraid of drinking him to death? If something really happened to him, his children would probably tear you apart alive."

"Oh, that's fine. His children were at home last night too, they just didn't participate."

Zhou Yi, struggling to get out of the quilt, scratched his messy hair and added another piece of news: "Oh right, a segment was added to the concert at the last minute. Huang Zhan is coming as a guest."

"???"

For a moment, Qian Jiang even doubted if he had gotten up too violently in the morning and his ears were hallucinating.

"Yes, you heard right. After getting drunk last night, he clung to my pant leg, crying and begging me to let him play a round, otherwise he'd smash his head to death."

"..."

"Also, your song rankings. All the major authoritative charts across the two sides of the strait and Hong Kong and Macau have been completely dominated by you."

"How much?" Hearing that the sales were higher day by day, Zhou Yi immediately became interested.

"It's already exceeded 1.3 million copies. That's insane, especially against the backdrop of rampant piracy."

Qian Jiang turned to the page recording the data.

Admittedly, he had already seen this number in the morning, but even seeing it again, he couldn't help but draw in a sharp breath of cold air—

November 20th, "Gui Zang" was released.

In just one day, sales in Taiwan exceeded 140,000 copies, in Hong Kong over 30,000, and on the mainland reached 210,000. Combined, the first-day national sales of "Gui Zang" directly exceeded 400,000 copies.

In one day, it sold as much as half a year's sales for a veteran top-tier singer like Harlem Yu.

This was an extremely terrifying number.

Before "Gui Zang" was released, it wasn't just Qian Jiang worrying about MP3 piracy; record companies like Sony and Universal, which were also plagued by piracy, were equally monitoring Zhou Yi's sales.

Although everyone hated that he had eaten up so much of the market, they had to admit that Zhou Yi had now become the ceiling for record sales in the Mandarin music industry—if even he couldn't make it, then the market was truly beyond saving.

But when this battle report actually came out, Sony and Universal's eyes almost bulged out green.

Pan Weibo, who became famous last year with "Gecko Walk," received strong support from Universal Records this year. His second personal music album "Microphone," released in September, immediately made people feel it was riding on the coattails of Zhou Yi's debut album song "My Microphone," and Universal顺势 slapped the nickname "Hip-Hop Little Zhou Yi" on him.

Although the album's title track "Microphone" was a cover of a Korean song, it helped Pan Weibo attract quite a few trendy fans—but even so, this album with such strong momentum had only managed to cut down sales of just over 330,000 copies so far.

Sony didn't even need to be mentioned.

Their top hope for this year, Wang Lihong, had obviously let down the high-level expectations; he was done for.

"Incredible" had an industry reputation that was off the charts, and Li Zongsheng had even personally come forward to praise it, but the market reaction was a lack of follow-through—

Mainly because there wasn't even any MP3 piracy data from Baidu to brag about; not a single song on the entire album had broken into the top twenty.

The only song that made a bit of a splash, the love song "You Are Not Here," ranked 27th on the Baidu MP3 monthly search chart, not even as high as the old songs "Dusk" and "Jiang Nan." And even that was pushed up by popularity; currently, the search volume growth rate was extremely slow, and dropping out of the top thirty was just a matter of time.

It was very awkward.

This was enough to show that the album "Incredible" had lost its subsequent market potential; weak sales were now a fact set in stone.

In contrast, as soon as Zhou Yi's new album "Gui Zang" went on sale, MP3 search volumes skyrocketed, with the top five of the search chart all being Zhou Yi's songs—"Blue and White Porcelain" surged to first place, and "Qi Li Xiang" fell to second.

"Writing Poems for You," "You Were Once a Youth," and "Forever Love" also powerfully surged into the top five five days after the album's release.

Although "Meeting" and "Sunny Day" were equally unwilling to yield and showed signs of squeezing back into the top five, they were currently suppressed tightly by the search volume Zhou Yi had driven up with his popularity.

Logically speaking, even for Zhou Yi, after the initial release day, the album's sales data would inevitably head into a decline—

Although it was still a number unreachable by ordinary top-tier singers, for the current Zhou Yi, this speed could be called a crash.

And it was right at this moment that the debate regarding Zhou Yi's new album began to erupt concentratedly online. Many people started paying attention to this matter, thereby attracting even more people to notice this album—

Especially that highly praised song "Blue and White Porcelain."

As they kept cursing, Warner surprisingly discovered: Eh? How are the sales actually going up?

It climbed to 200,000 copies on the fourth day, and returned to 210,000 copies on the fifth day?

"Gui Zang," which should have been unable to break the one million mark in five days, actually went up with the support of increasingly fierce controversy heat, broke the law of decline, and rushed back up to the million mark in a posture that stunned the industry insiders—

Originally, these four had already proven what it meant to be top-tier stars in the Mandarin music industry, but Zhou Yi's appearance told the whole country what a top-tier world superstar was—

Although according to the laws of the record industry, sales from the fifth to seventh day could basically reach about 80% of the album's lifetime sales, with the rest being a slow grind; this was also why Zhou Jielun and others' albums were so popular but only had this much sales after several months.

Zhou Yi would probably not escape this either.

"Damn! Who the hell is still buying this dog's album!"

"Not strange. Zhou Yi's base is too deep; every album has a huge hit song. From first-tier cities down to third-tier small towns and fifth-tier villages, everyone can hum a couple of lines. The audience reach is too broad."

"Mainly because you can see him on the news often; this is too invincible. He's winning glory for the country abroad, making European and American singers run away with their heads in their hands."

"To be honest, indeed, but this time it's mainly because Zhou Yi's song "Blue and White Porcelain" is too unreasonable. My dad is 67 this year; can you believe he's actually looping "Blue and White Porcelain"? When he used to listen to songs like "Dong Feng Po" and "Fireworks Cold in the East," he would only listen two or three times before turning it off."

"Doing 1.2 million in five days; this album is aiming for two or three million again."

"You missed the overseas market. Zhou Yi has sales overseas too; although they aren't much, added together they can at least make up a million-level figure. Maybe this "Gui Yi" can actually break records and sell over four million copies, breaking Zhang Xueyou's "Kiss Goodbye" record."

"No wonder he's the Music Emperor, letting the world go first. Emperor Zhou is invincible, I submit!"

"What Emperor Zhou? Call him Emperor Yi!"

At this moment when the public opinion environment for Zhou Yi suddenly became terrible, Warner's release of this battle report was a huge boost to the morale of their allies—

"Thanks to that group of people's promotion. Without them constantly cursing, Zhou Yi's song "Blue and White Porcelain" probably wouldn't have spread so widely so quickly."

Of course, there were also clear-eyed people who saw the biggest reason why "Blue and White Porcelain" could break out of the circle so quickly—

Besides the inherently solid quality and Zhou Yi's unique top-tier popularity, this war of curses that swept across the internet world was of great merit, directly attracting many people who were originally uninterested to hear this song in the very first moment, and thus buying the album.

This was the biggest reason for reversing the declining sales.

Yuan Li was numb.

At 10:05 AM on the 29th, Phoenix TV's "Lu Yu You Yue: Zhou Yi Special" aired at the time point they had promoted a week in advance.

The moment everyone finished watching, whether they were on the enemy side or the ally side, all of them widened their eyes in disbelief.

Only the onlookers jumping up and down with glee were overjoyed—

"That's the vibe! That's the vibe! This is the Zhou Yi I know!"

"Zhou Yi's mouth is truly awesome; did he just create a new term?"

"That thing, if you don't understand, just ask: why does Zhou Yi call them 'breeders' and explain it like that? Aren't they talking about music and albums?"

(End of this chapter)