A part-time crew made China's top AI drama, and every layer of it belongs to ByteDance
Into the Song has run ten 100-episode seasons on Hongguo since August. The viral debt story is wrong, the play counts belong to different counters, and the money figures are the team's own word.
Into the Song, an AI microdrama made by a part-time online crew under 54-year-old Zhang Hansheng, has run ten 100-episode seasons on ByteDance's Hongguo app since August 22. It shows a small remote team can top the vertical drama charts on craft and pace rather than a studio budget, but every tool it depends on belongs to one company.
The version trending in China this week gets three things wrong. No interview says Zhang was in debt: producer and head writer Li Chaohua said one team member joined carrying debt and has since cleared it. The 6.6 billion figure is an estimate from Guduo Data, while the producer counted 4 billion plays in early October, and neither counts viewers. Zhang is chief planner, He Xiushan is chief director, and Zhang spent a year as a paid trainee at an online AI drama course before any of this aired.
The method is more disciplined than the amateur label suggests. Six people make the episodes, each one owned end to end by a single person, and a shared library of characters, down to the extras, keeps faces from drifting. Ordinary shots take about three generations and battle shots 20 or more, and each weekly season is reworked from the comments.
Then there is the part the coverage skipped. The source novel comes from Tomato Novel, the director says Seedance 2.5 makes the video and the voices, the edit is done in Jianying, the series streams on Hongguo, and its loudest booster this week was Douyin vice president Li Liang. All of it belongs to ByteDance.
The money is the team's own word. It says compute passed 1 million yuan (about $140,000) and brought back about 10 million yuan, but compute is not the whole budget and nobody outside has checked the profit claim.
Our take: the craft is real and the way this crew works is worth copying. A hit built entirely inside one company's tools is that company's showcase first, so keep your audience somewhere you own.
Source: Red Star News, Nov 3, 2026; Jiemian, Nov 5, 2026; Yangcheng Evening News, Nov 6, 2026; Guduo Data via Dianyingjie, Oct 15, 2026.
Read the full article: thegenerated.com/stories/into-the-song-ai-microdrama-bytedance-20261106
