Despite knowing exactly how to increase the chances of a song going viral on the internet, this knowledge was of no use to him in the other world.
After the fight with Rowan Espinoza, the man who, behind the scenes, practically controlled all of showbiz, nothing Theo did had any effect. It didn't matter how good the songs were, how well thought out the promotion strategies were or how creative the tactics were... everything was swallowed up by an invisible wall that he never managed to break through.
Rowan had made a point of turning the name "Theo Black" into a synonym for everything the public despised. In newspaper headlines, on TV shows and even in conversations on social media, everyone repeated the same accusations about him, until no one questioned whether it was true anymore.
And it wasn't just him, as he discovered, everyone who offended Rowan was blacklisted and never managed to grow.
With his image tarnished by labels that seemed impossible to remove, the public had no interest, empathy or even curiosity for anything he did.
Even when a song was good, people ignored it, not for lack of interest, but so as not to "give stage" to someone they believed to be a monster.
But here, in this new world, that weight simply didn't exist!
Theo could post any song and know that it would be judged for what it was - a song! The public would react to the melody, the lyrics, the emotion it aroused, not some distorted version of him spread by someone powerful.
Knowing that here he was just another young artist on the rise, and not the image of him that everyone believed, was an incredible feeling of freedom!
So he began the first stage of his plan, the production of the song.
Normally the process of producing a song was time-consuming because it depended on creativity and finding the right rhythm for that song, choosing instruments or effects to add to the music, or things like that.
But since Theo already knew perfectly well how this song should be made, he would only have to find every detail in the app and the production process would be much faster.
The problem was that he didn't have a good microphone... recording the vocals of the song with a cell phone microphone would cause the overall quality of the song to drop a lot.
Thinking that Divine Idol was a music program, Theo thought of a possibility.
Finding Eliza's contact details, Theo quickly sent her a message.
Theo: [Hey, I'm sorry to bother you now, but does the show's staff happen to have the audio track of my vocal while I was singing Hope].
Just a few minutes later a reply arrived.
Eliza: [Yes, we have it, but why do you need it?]
He didn't hide the reason.
Theo: [I'm making a final version of the song to release on the internet, but my microphone is very bad... if I can use the audio of my vocal sung yesterday it will make my job here a lot easier].
On the other side of town, Eliza saw that message and realized that this would be a good thing for the show, after all, the more popular the participants were, the bigger the show's audience would be.
Eliza: [Give me two hours].
Theo: [Thank you very much!]
With Eliza's assurance, Theo became even more excited as he went back to recreating the song on the show.
'I just hope this old laptop can handle it...' He thought worriedly as he heard the laptop's cooler whirring like it was about to take flight.
Some of the effects he'd used on the original song in the other world weren't available in the application, so from time to time he had to stop and search the internet to download the effects he needed.
Downloading the packages made the laptop gasp for space, so he cleared out old folders with anime episodes that were saved on the hard drive, deleted some music lessons he had saved and restarted the program twice until it stabilized.
Because of how slow the laptop was, it took Theo more than three hours just to play the instrumental of the song from his memory.
With that done, Theo picked up his cell phone and began the second stage of his plan.
To make a song go viral as a completely unknown artist, the ideal strategy would be to find some way of using the song in a context that would arouse curiosity before the person even heard the whole song.
In the original world, Theo had seen this happen countless times, where average songs exploded because they were linked to an interesting moment, a striking scene or a "making of".
And that's when a specific memory came to mind: the case of the song "Light Switch".
This was a case where it wasn't just the song that caught the eye, but the way it was presented. The audience followed every little step of the creation, as if they were sitting next to the artist, giving their opinions, laughing and waiting anxiously for the final result.
When the song came out, people felt that they had been part of creating it.
Theo couldn't reproduce exactly the same process, since Hope was ready... but that didn't mean he couldn't create that feeling.
He just needed to act it out.
Slouched in his desk chair, Theo closed his eyes and imagined the scene: his cell phone camera resting on the corner of the desk, capturing the room illuminated by the soft morning light. He, in his sweatshirt and messy hair, strumming his guitar and humming the first verse, as if he had just thought of it, similar to how he originally created the song in the other world.
In the video he would make some dramatic pauses, some scribbles in a notebook, he would crack a shy smile as he found the chorus... and then he could alternate with some cuts to the Divine Idol stage, showing the lights and the applause exploding, showing the same part of the song, but now with the final version of the song he just made playing in the background while showing the reactions of the show's audience to the song.
This contrast, showing intimacy against grandeur, would be irresistible to the audience. It would give them the feeling that they were seeing Hope's birth and, at the same time, the moment she really "came to life".
What's more, it wouldn't require anything he couldn't do. All he had to do was use a makeshift tripod, record the scenes in the bedroom and then edit the best moments of the live performance.
Theo pushed back his chair and began to put the idea into practice.
He started by pulling the curtain back only halfway, letting the light in diffusely. Then he stacked two thick books on the desk, propped a mug on top and placed his cell phone there, tilted slightly.
He didn't have a professional tripod, but for this video, it would have been better if he had used something more improvised to make it look more real.
Then he checked the framing, making sure that only a little more than half of his face was visible, the guitar on his lap and an open notebook beside him.
He took a deep breath, placed his thumb on the strings and tried a simple strum, just to warm up.
Then he opened the notebook and wrote the word HOPE at the top of the page, in big letters so that if someone focused on it, they could read it from the video.
"Okay... let's try this in one take." He muttered, pressing the record button.
For the first few seconds, he let the camera "catch" a little silence. The pause was intentional, not only to make the video more realistic, but also to use it to create suspense and arouse the audience's curiosity.
Then he looked up, as if he were talking to himself, and said quietly:
"What if the music... was a conversation with myself?" He asked himself.
Then he began softly strumming the guitar in his lap and pretended to mutter a few random words until it finally came out:
"Swore you'd change, kept playing the part... but where's the proof... where did you start?"
He stopped exactly in the middle of the verse, pretending to think, scribbled two words in his notebook and shook his head, as if finding the missing answer.
"I'm not here to make you feel small, but I won't keep taking the fall..." He whispered, looking at his own reflection in the darkness of the screen. "I gave you your time to shine... now the spotlight's finally mine..."
He re-recorded this same sequence two more times, varying only the length of the pause and the way he looked at the camera.
Even with the memory of what the creative process was like for this song, and as much as he tried his best to sound natural doing it, as a guarantee he decided to have several options and choose the best one in the edit.
Then he prepared the "snap". He knew that the turn of the video had to match the turn of the song, so he set the tempo by tapping his foot on the floor. When he felt the moment was right, he let his voice soar.
"What's success? It's not a car, a chain, or a check..."
The camera shook just enough to look human. He held the last verse tightly, stretching out the phrase just as he did on the show's stage.
"It's showing up when there's NOTHING LEFT!"
Then he recorded this part a few more times too until he was satisfied and uploaded the videos to his computer.
Meanwhile, his cell phone vibrated twice and a notification floated up with the name [Eliza]. Theo opened it immediately.
Eliza: [I've sent the file of your vocal from the performance + a second clean track from the lavalier microphone. The files are in .wav, good luck].
He couldn't hold back his smile.
Theo: [Thank you, Eliza.]
He quickly downloaded the files and dragged everything into the project session of the editing program he had cracked.
As the instrumental was already ready, all he had to do was align the voice track to the grid, adjust the breathing at a few points, run a de-esser to remove some consonants that came out too low technically, and add a short reverb to the chorus part.
The result sounded great!
With the audio ready, Theo opened the video editor, but the preview crashed every few frames, so he had to reduce the resolution of the preview to 1/16th of the original quality and turn around to figure out what the blurry pixels on the screen were.
Setting up the narrative line, he started with the silent pause, but to arouse the audience's curiosity, he put a caption before he even started talking with the phrase "What if... it was a conversation with myself?", and, on the tap of his foot, he brought up the low verse from the bedroom.
Every two or three seconds he would cut to a different shot of the same take, something he learned very well from Mr. Beast videos to keep the audience's attention so that no one would feel like sliding their finger up.
Halfway through "What's success?", he set up the impact.
He imported the clips of the live performance that were already circulating on the internet, chose the angle at which the white light drew the outline of his body and synchronized it with the explosion of "NOTHING LEFT!".
The way the edit turned out, it looked as if the cut had been planned on the day of the show.
Back in the bedroom scene, he kept to just one sustained chord, leaving the recording of an actual sigh from him as he whispered, "I think I've found my Hope."
To close, he put up a one-second black screen with [#Hope - available on Lyra] and, without transition, returned to the first frame of the video, with his hand hovering over the guitar strings, creating an invisible loop so that the audience wouldn't realize the video was over and would increase the video's retention, inducing the algorithm to spread the video to more people.
Reviewing the video again, Theo felt he could improve a few more things, so he edited the video's subtitles so that the overall typography was simple and clean, but that in the "Twenty years...", "What's success? " and "NOTHING LEFT! " sections the typography was different, highlighting what he was talking about.
As the cover of the video, he chose the moment when he was looking down, with his notebook open and "HOPE" crossed out in pen.
Satisfied, Theo pressed render and slowly looked at the bar.
At 95%, the bar froze for a long ten seconds, making him hold his breath in concern, even closing two useless apps open in the background and finally seeing 100% arrive, slowly but surely.
"One of the first purchases I have to make when I get a bit of money is a real computer..." He spoke to himself as he jotted this thought down in the corner of his notebook.
Watching the video again while trying to get the perspective of the audience watching it got him very excited, so Theo called Liam over to see how the little boy would react.
Hearing Theo's call, Liam came running, still chewing on something, and threw himself on his bed.
Throughout the video, Liam's eyes were glued to the screen, totally entertained by the story.
When the video finished, Liam blinked as if he'd just come out of a trance.
"Bro, when did you record this?! I've never seen you so focused on writing a song!" He asked, shocked.
That was exactly the impression Theo wanted to give, that this was something old and that it was only now that he had sung the song that he decided to post it.
Looking at the finished video, Theo looked at the time and decided to post this video directly on his profile now.