Chapter 148: Something of a Myth

By the third day, the rumors had spread far enough that people from other corners of NX Music department and started joining in:

Producers Park hadn’t worked with began sending instrumentals, composers appeared with unfinished ideas, people who regularly worked around particular singers started asking whether he could listen to this, try something with that, or tell them why a chorus they’d been fighting for 2 weeks still felt dead.

Park eventually dedicated 2 days almost entirely to writing:

He sat with headphones, a notebook, water, food Quinn kept forcing within reach and an absurd pile of instrumentals from across the department.

Some two tracks took an hour, others took 20 minutes, a few produced nothing and got tossed aside without ceremony, because despite the increasingly offensive rumors about him, Park wasn’t a vending machine for music where people inserted even the stupidest beats and received platinum records.

The following days were mostly recording these songs he’d wrote for them.

The engineer from his first session ended up handling much of it because he’d already learned how Park worked and had developed the exhausted acceptance of a man whose professional standards were being bullied.

Around 20 songs passed through the booth in one form or another across genres, Park recording reference vocals so the artists who eventually received them could hear the melody, phrasing, rhythm and emotional direction properly.

They weren’t Nathaniel Park songs and Park claimed none of them.

The whole point was for other NX artists to take them, record their own versions and release them.

That was also when Park realized his songwriting had quietly begun turning into actual money before he’d even released his own debut.

The internal structure of NX Music was becoming clearer too:

All producers had artists they worked with constantly...

...Some composers floated between several singers while clearly belonging to one little creative camp more than the others.

Certain teams practically lived around one star and others fed material into several rosters depending on where a song fit.

Park didn’t fully understand the politics and factions in the agency yet, but by the third day he’d already recognized that most of the instrumentals he’d been handed hadn’t been created randomly:

Many already had singers in mind.

Which meant the songs Park wrote over them were eventually going somewhere and would be released.

And when they did, his name sat on the songwriting side.

Park had reduced the royalty mess to simple idiot-friendly math for his own sanity:

Say a released song made 1,000,000 Cels, and for the sake of easy calculation the songwriting side represented 10%, meaning 100,000 Cels belonged to the writer pool; him!\

If Park had written the entire composition himself, his contract protected 100% of his writer share, so that whole 100,000 belonged to him before whatever agreed publishing administration costs applied.

If he had co-written it equally with another person, they split that writer pool 50/50%.

Park got 50,000.

The other writer got 50,000.

If the record eventually became enormous and the writer pool reached 1,000,000 Cels, Park writing it alone meant the million was his writer share.

If there were 2 equal writers, 500,000 each.

That was the important part.

Park wasn’t receiving 100% of everything the artist’s recording earned.

The singer, NX, master owners and everybody else still had their own slices of the carcass. Park simply owned 100% of whatever songwriting percentage belonged to the composition when he wrote it alone.

Streams, downloads, public performances, licensing and all the other little roads money used to crawl back toward a song could keep feeding that share later.

Park liked this arrangement tremendously.

He could write a song on Tuesday, hand it to another artist, go home, forget about it for 3 months and eventually receive money because millions of strangers had decided to emotionally damage themselves with something he’d written while eating Quinn’s stolen fries.

More importantly, he knew that money was coming.

Maybe not tomorrow or next month since the songs had to be placed, recorded, produced, scheduled and released first, and Park was learning that the music business possessed an almost supernatural ability to turn a 4-minute song into 6 months of paperwork.

But these producers belonged to real creative circles around real NX artists. If the songs were good enough, they would move.

Park’s job was becoming wonderfully simple.

Write, record the reference/demo, wait for somebody else to sing it, wait longer and receive money.

Beautiful.

The social side of NX Music changed just as quickly too.

At first, Park could still feel the old ugliness around some of the men; a little jealousy, a little suspicion, hatred, envy; that instinctive irritation his face and presence seemed capable of producing before he even opened his mouth.

Why was this nineteen-year-old rookie getting access to everybody? Why were producers suddenly dragging him between studios? Why did the bastard look like that on top of everything else he could do?

But when they actually worked with him, talent made some forms of hatred of the Cursed Presence inconvenient.

And Park helped by not acting like some perfect little god who had descended from heaven to educate the peasants about music; these people possessed years, sometimes decades, of experience he simply didn’t have.

A producer would hear when his chorus arrived too late or too emotional, an arranger would point out that Park had overcrowded a section, engineers taught him studio habits he’d never needed before.

Older writers occasionally looked at a lyric Park liked and told him it was shit was too good and creative and too complicated but he corrected them.

Yes, sometimes Park argued and proved them wrong, sometimes they proved him wrong and Park changed it.

That was how respect started replacing most of the jealousy.

Before long he could find himself at midnight on a studio couch with 3 grown men, singing stupid alternate lyrics to make everybody laugh while somebody else explained why one of his original ideas deserved to be taken outside and shot.

They were creatives, people obsessed enough with music that genuine talent eventually mattered more than the irritation attached to the face carrying it.

Park appreciated that more than he expected.

Of course, music wasn’t the only project occupying his attention.

The shameless bastard had also begun carefully, patiently and with absolutely no noble intentions whatsoever, working his way toward Viktoria and Léonie’s pants.

Handsome as he was, unfair as some of the advantages life had apparently given him were, it was not proving nearly as easy as his ego would have preferred.

But there was progress.

’Fucking real progress.’