Frank Kogan

My use of the word "live" was problematic. But what I mean regarding T-ara in the current situation is: "facing an audience where there's the possibility of an adverse reaction," disregarding whether the performance is sung or lipsynched and whether the whole thing (audience as well as performers) is pre-taped or at the same time as the broadcast.

It seems likely, from what I've seen and surmised, that different shows do it differently, and might well also vary it from act to act and circumstance to circumstance. As far as singing goes, I assume that for ballad singers and duets, the singing isn't lipsynched (but that doesn't mean the clip isn't sometimes recorded in advance, perhaps with multiple takes and with parts of different takes strung together). Whereas for idol groups, esp. when there's lots of dancing, the standard is that all of the backup vocals are prerecorded, but some or most of the lead parts are sung onstage (whether the "stage" is at the same time of the broadcast or not), though I'd guess (emphasize guess) that for at least some of these the sound mixer is mixing in prerecorded leads with the sung leads. And I guess you're suggesting a third possibility: that the performance is done as before (some sung leads but prerecorded background) but then the whole thing is taped and then performed again, entirely lipsynched, but including the rawness and wavers and breathlessness, if any, of the previously sung version.

(On comeback stages there are intro parts that are entirely prerecorded.)

As for the presence of an audience at the performance, I can imagine a bunch more possibilities: performance done entirely without an audience (possibly w/ multiple takes and costume changes and intersplicing), then the clip is broadcast live, but you don't even hear anything of the live audience during the clip, only at the beginning and the end; prerecorded as before, except when the clip is played back you do hear fan chants, screams, applause during the track; prerecorded in front of an audience (maybe carefully preselected or maybe not) with multiple takes and costume changes if necessary, and it's that prerecorded audience you hear live; prerecorded as before but with original audience sounds left out and replaced by the audience sounds during broadcast; prerecorded in front of an audience but in a single take; performed live in front of the broadcast audience.

When you combine all these you get a potentially large number of permutations. I gather that Music Core and Music Bank do things differently, though obviously I haven't researched this. Wikip is little help: says that all four of the main performance shows are "broadcast live," whatever that means. For M! Countdown it says, "The show features some of the latest and most popular artists who perform live on stage." Whatever that means.

But to reiterate: what I think is crucial here is that T-ara perform before a potentially unpredictable audience, which they certainly can do (and have done) in the past. Certainly some of the shows allow this.

Why do I think this is crucial?

That might be part of another post. But someone's got to take some risk sometime. They can't continue on with a whole bunch of industries running scared. Or they can continue on like this, but why would they want to?

UPDATE: T-ara faced a live audience yesterday (says Naver as translated by allkpop), at the 2012 World Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources concert in Jejudo Islands, along with BoA, SHINee, 2AM, Wooyoung, ZE:A, EXO-K, Nine Muses, and A Pink. So I needn't be so pessimistic. Don't know what the reaction was overall (story was typically sparse); there was this:

"However, during T-ara's performance some fans retaliated by turning their glow-stick off which was followed by a silent protest."