AT midday yesterday, Taiwanese Mandopop superstar Jay Chou released the music video of his new song titled “The Greatest Work,” which is eponymous with his next album to be released this month. Chou, 43, announced in June that his long-awaited 15th album would be out July 15. The highly anticipated project is his first studio album in six years, since 2016’s “Jay Chou’s Bedtime Stories.” The music video, featuring Chou himself and pianist Lang Lang, shows the singer time traveling to the 1920s and meeting with deceased artists and their works. The MV of the song that merges hiphop, pop and classical elements had been viewed by more than 46 million people as of 4 p.m. yesterday. The new album, whose presales will begin Friday, has set a new record for Chou on QQ Music as the singer whose new release acquired 3 million presale reservations in the shortest period. More than 7 million had reserved the presale of the album on the platform as of 4 p.m. yesterday. However, the new album had received a low rating of 5.3 points out of 10 on Chinese review site Douban, even though it has not been officially released. Fans discovered that the new album had already been reviewed on Douban on Monday. The rating was as low as 5.3 in the beginning, rising to 5.8 and then 7.5 eventually. More than half of the so-called reviews gave the album a five-star rating, and there were even a few reviews which gave it a one-star rating, claiming that Chou has run out of inspiration in his new album. Douban took to Chinese social media platform Weibo on Monday evening, apologizing for allowing users to review an unreleased album and blaming it on a “software bug.” “We have turned off the ratings and cleared all the reviews,” it said. Douban also promised that similar errors would not occur in the future. On May 20 and 21, nearly 100 million viewers watched the online recast of two previous live concerts by Chou, setting a record as the most-viewed online concerts on the platforms run by Tencent, the tech giant behind WeChat and QQ Music. (Li Dan) | 