Credit: Coolsmurf, Coolsmurf



Korean music experts disappointed with the success of Infinity Challenge mini-album

MBC released a mini-album this past week where all 7 songs from the Infinity Challenge Olympic Duet Song Festival were included and sales have so far exceeded 30k. Songs have also hit all the major charts in Korea with some like Let's Dance and Naengmyun. But the huge success of this mini-album have also led to music experts slamming the hastily put together album and their disappointment at it doing extremely well in sales, and was an insult to the Korean music industry.

Their main complaint was the ridiculously short time it took to put the album together and the impressive sales volume which simply doesn't make any sense. According to sources, the average time it took to compose each song on the mini-album was only a hour. Take the song Naengmyun for example which was performed by MyungCaDrive (Park Myung Soo, SNSD's Jessica), it took E-Tribe just 30 minutes to write and compose the entire song. Recording the song took only 1.5 hours while the most amount of time was spent in learning the dance chereography which also amounted to less than 2 days. A simple calculation meant that all the songs, from composing to learning the dance cheoreography was completed in less than 10 days, a sharp contrast with singers who usually take 2 to 3 months time to come out with an album.

And what's even more surprising is that the mini-album has already sold in excess of 30k copies in less that a week and reflects badly on other singers who painstakingly comes out with albums but yet do miserably in the sales department.

Korea's mass culture critic, Kang Tae Gyu compared the overall sales volume of Wonder Girls' Tell Me mini-album which sold around 40k copies against the Infinity Challenge Olympic Duet Song mini-album which has already sold 30k copies in less than a week and said, "The huge success of the Infinity Challenge mini-album is kind of like an insult to the present Korean music industry. No matter how much effort or hard work you put into producing an album, as long as you promote it on a popular variety show or become a popular search term on portal sites, the album would sell very well. This is a crushing blow to many of those who wants to make music and it seems like, you have to know the tricks of promotion to get good sales volume. The sales volume is not dependant anymore on how hard the singer works behind the scenes."



Backup dancer Ji Yul gains attention

The Infinity Challenge special, Duet Song Festival on 11th July was a huge success, with seven groups of singers serving up a real treat with their respective songs.

But an unexpected surprise was the rise in popularity of a backup dancer, Ji Yul from a group called IDMyo, and had appeared during MyungCaDrive's (Park Myung Soo, Jessica) performance of their song, Naengmyun (Cold noodles).

After the broadcast, many netizens commented, "the backup dancer seems to be prettier than Jessica", "Was this a humilation of Jessica", as Ji Yul swiftly became an instant internet star overnight with many favourable comments. With more and more netizens getting interested, many search terms like "Ji Yul" ,"IDmyo", "Naengmyun", "Infinity Challenge backup dancer" surfaced and were all in the top 10 positions. More than 70,000 visits to Ji Yul's Cyworld minihompy were also registered overnight.

At the time of writing on 16th July, more than 300,000 people have visited Ji Yul's Cyworld minihompy. To relieve netizens' interest in her, reporters paid a visit to her group's dance studio recently to get to know Ji Yul even better. The 21 year old, Ji Yul, who had minimal makeup on her, had gotten into the dance group, IDMyo, 6 months ago after an audition and is now dancing to her heart's content while on her summer vacation. Not only is she good in dancing, Ji Yul also excels in her Japanese language major at a local university, and has also received a scholarship for her good grades. Always humble during the interview, we look forward to seeing more of her in future.

Ji Yul also appeared during Rani's performance on the 17th July episode of Music Bank.