Author 丨 Lu Li
Executive Producer 丨 寛夕
On the evening of January 23, Macao staged a unique event - TMEA Tencent Music Entertainment Festival (hereinafter referred to as TMEEA Festival).
As an awards ceremony with "musicality" as the core, the TMEA Festival has been held since its first edition at the end of 2019, aiming to create an authoritative annual music festival.
In the background of this special year in 2020, the second TMEA festival held this time carries a heavier meaning, with the theme of "Music to Live is born for music", Tencent Music Entertainment Group hopes to use music to rekindle the enthusiasm and hope of life, convey inspiring power, and record the extraordinary "lifetime" with good music.
This grand ceremony not only included Lin Junjie, Ren Xianqi, Mayday, Zhang Liangying, Zhou Shen, Ren Xianqi, Xue Zhiqian and other peak strength musicians, Cai Xukun, Chen Linong, Little Ghost - Wang Linkai, Dai Meng, Lai Meiyun, SNH48 - Sun Rui, SING girl group, and other high-quality idols have joined, as well as Chen Grain, Bai An, CORSAK Hu Mengzhou and other popular original musicians to show their faces and offer their voices, whether it is pop, rock or national style, two-dimensional, so that every love of music lovers can be rewarded.
In addition to the star-studded scene, what made me pay more attention to this event was that the festival also enabled a number of industry-first black technologies, which not only provided a luxurious audio-visual feast for global music lovers, but also drew a new blueprint for the future development of online concerts.
TMEA Another year, how has music black technology become a keyword?
First of all, looking at the most important stage effects, the TMEA festival uses cutting-edge technologies such as naked-eye 3D, angled stages, and ice screen effects. Taking the corner stage as an example, by setting up a split-screen extension to create a corner stage, whether it is the perspective of online or offline audiences, the entire stage is an integrated presentation.
In addition, the mechanical scheduling of the entire stage is also very rich, not only there are ice screens, light stands, lifting and other forms - the number of CNC light stands used alone exceeds many satellite TV New Year's Eve parties - and the stage machinery are corresponding program services, showing a multi-angle dynamic change stage.
When Zhou Shen sang "The Whale Incarnated as an Isolated Island", a huge water bottle appeared on the opening screen, the light and shadow changed, the whale light and shadow slowly swam across the stage with the starlight of the universe, to Ren Xianqi brought "Tianya", not only arranged to add national music elements, but also visual pictures through the ice screen, creating a mysterious valley, stone seat and chivalrous back, audiovisual effects combined, making people's blood boiling the sense of narrow meaning of the rivers and lakes.
And so on, like a dream.
The TMEA festival also achieved two firsts: on the one hand, the industry's first set of concert ring screen live broadcast system, four-sided screen real-time connection, in the form of technology + screen hardware, so that fans waiting on the online platform or offline experience point can "visit the scene" to experience the festival boom.
On the other hand, based on the "microphone" function, which debuted in the song "Teenager", a record-breaking live + online + offline chorus of more than one million people was realized. You know, this chorus covers the user songs of QQ Music, Kuwo Music, Kugou Music and National K Song, which are the four major APP songs, not only to have proper data input and integration, but also to achieve the integration and output of songs, but also to ensure the stable integration of audiovisual and stage effects, and its technical difficulty is not difficult to imagine.
Even the red carpet check-in area is unique, using special magnetic crystal notes with stave walls, and recording each singer and artist at the TMEA festival by checking in.
Throughout the whole festival, this is essentially TME to achieve content expression, stage effects, user experience and other aspects of optimization and improvement by promoting the deep integration of technology, scenes and user needs. It not only defines the high standards and specifications of online concerts, but also the most technologically sound music entertainment festival to date.
In fact, in recent years, the promotion and landing of cutting-edge technologies such as 5G, 8K, AI, AR, and VR are playing an increasingly important role in the changes in the music industry.
The entire music industry, from production to dissemination to consumption, has benefited from this, and in terms of technology-enabled music performances alone, there are many pearls and jades in the world. As early as 2010, Jay Chou's Shanghai Super Era Concert used holographic projection technology to generate a 360-degree three-dimensional image of Zhou Dong that can be seen at 360 degrees, which once caused heated discussion.
With the rise of online concerts in recent years, cutting-edge technology has formed a deep relationship with online performances. TME live, TME's panoramic music live entertainment brand, has delivered an excellent answer sheet in this regard:
In July last year, TME live created the first panoramic virtual hyper-live performance for Liu Xianhua, combining virtual, reality and 4K HD code streaming to achieve real-time interaction between live singers and two-dimensional images, creating a benchmark for ultra-live performances.
For example, mayday's "suddenly want to see you" online concert, TME live with a unique performance venue and song selection, process design to present a strong sense of story of the picture, with the film quality of the general visual experience, bringing a refreshing audiovisual effect. Under the extremely difficult and meticulous camera lens switching technology, the classic scene of Mayday's leap from the stage to the audience was realized.
And in November, TME Live and Universal Music teamed up to create "WHERE DO WE GO?" for Billie Eilish. The concert, based on XR technology, visualized the creative story behind each song, creating a variety of stage elements such as giant spiders, cosmic space, and tropical rainforests, and the whole performance was like a Hollywood blockbuster mixed with horror, science fiction, and animation, giving the audience an unforgettable strong sensory impact.
These virtual and real online concerts that are beyond imagination stem from TME's active attempts and accumulation of musical expressions with technology, and at the same time, they have also made footnotes for it.
In other words, as the leader of China's online music entertainment services, TME has not spared much in terms of technology + music, not only its QQ music, Kugou music with audio fingerprints, melody extraction and other scientific and technological innovations have won many domestic and foreign awards, since March last year, dozens of TME live online performances have also accumulated deep experience in creating online concerts, and now it is only reasonable to be able to support online concerts with black technology innovation.
According to statistics, last night's TMEA festival only 4 platforms such as QQ Music and other online viewers hit a new high, which is equivalent to the world's top 100 stadiums full of business for two consecutive weeks. The number of related topics read by the whole network reached 11.4 billion, the number of discussions reached 20 million, and it was on the hot search more than 40 times, which shows the recognition and love of the majority of music fans for the TMEA festival.
With the rise of online concerts, technology embraces art to bring more value
In fact, with the continuous expansion of the online traffic pool and the cultivation of music fans' paid consumption habits, online performances have long-term layout value and are a new growth point for the music industry.
Last year's outbreak of the epidemic tore a new hole in online performances, according to Goldman Sachs's "Music In the Air" forecast, due to the impact of the epidemic, the global live music revenue in 2020 will fall from the previous forecast of $28.8 billion to $7 billion, a loss of more than three-quarters.
In this context, online concerts have become a powerful complement to the music performance industry.
Of course, online concerts are not perfect, there are also pain points such as the performance process is limited by technology and equipment, the live atmosphere is missing compared to offline, etc. If the online concert is only moved to the offline performance in the form of live broadcasting, it is obviously not enough to support a real new industry.
In this regard, the TMEA Festival, as a grand ceremony that is genetically different from other entertainment concerts, first of all, starts with technology and effectively solves many pain points of online concerts.
Taking the "microphone" that has achieved online and offline chorus of thousands of people as an example, in the post-epidemic era, the biggest dilemma of online performance is actually the lack of emotions, that is, the network and screen are separated from online and offline, singers and artists are difficult to intuitively feel the enthusiasm of online audiences at the performance site, and the audience group cannot enjoy the sense of participation and warm atmosphere of offline concerts, and it is more difficult to immerse themselves in it.
The "microphone" realizes that whether you are in front of a certain screen in a certain city offline, a KTV, or watch the performance online through the APP, you can participate in the chorus, and the final chorus of 10,000 people becomes part of the performance, in a two-way positive feedback form, to complete the emotional exchange between the audience and the singer.
This kind of chorus reproduction of the offline performance to the climax is an air dialogue like applause, screaming and glow sticks for the singers and the audience, which solves the pain points of the weak sense of participation and immersion in the previous online concerts.
This has also changed the form of expression of online concerts to a certain extent - no longer I sing to you, but we sing together, no longer a brief emotional release under the carnival, but a spiritual dialogue in mass entertainment.
For example, based on a series of cutting-edge technologies such as visual division matrix, firewall mapping, two-way 100M dedicated line, screen splicing live broadcast, etc., TMEA Grand Ceremony realizes the real-time seamless conversion of the main venue and the sub-venue, maintaining the integrity of the entire festival from space and time, whether you are online or offline, no matter which offline experience point you are in more than 100 cities, you can fully enjoy a non-fragmented, non-dramatic, immersive sensory experience.
More importantly, through naked-eye 3D, angled stage, ice screen effect and even tailored visual materials according to each song of each singer, the TMEA festival also realized the subversive optimization of the audiovisual effect of the concert, which greatly improved the viewing experience of the majority of consumer groups.
In Cai Xukun's performance track "Lover", the red and blue laser visual effects divide the stage into half flames and half seawater, and the naked-eye 3D effect that breaks through the screen also breaks through the visual limit. In the eyes of all the excited fanatics, Cai Xukun is no longer performing on the stage, but has entered an immersive MV plot to fully open the "show".
It is foreseeable that with the popularization of these black technologies, it will become the infrastructure of online concerts and even online performances, and the participants in the relevant industry chain can benefit from this, not only to create more innovative ways to play in the entire performance industry, thereby providing more possibilities for deepening the value of online performances, but also to create a new entertainment experience for more users, and to provide market space for the extension of new technologies such as 8K to the application layer, which has long-term significance.
Many times, technology is considered rational and cold, art is emotional and amorous, TMEA let us see technology and art at the foot of the mountain separate, and meet at the top of the mountain.
When science and technology and art are integrated, rationality and sensibility are intertwined to build a larger stage, science and technology have obtained a more attractive interpretation, and art has shown a fuller and more diversified value.
Write at the end
Nowadays, the emphasis on participation and immersion has become a major trend in the entertainment industry. At the end of the day, the immersion brought about by spiritual entertainment can make people temporarily forget the heaviness and burden of real life and enjoy happy times better.
Just 2 months ago, TME announced the completion of its equity investment in wave, a leading brand of virtual performance services, on the basis of which the two sides reached a deep strategic cooperation to continue to develop high-quality virtual concert content. This means that the speed of TME's power of technology + music is still accelerating, and the future layout of online performances is also constantly improving.
Through a series of scientific and technological innovations, TME has brought more forms of expression to music and entertainment, and is also speeding up on the road of bringing more participation and immersion to users.
This not only points out a direction for the development of online concerts, but also once again shows how surging potential energy can be exploded by the combination of traditional entertainment industry and cutting-edge technology, and there are more challenges – but also surprises – in the future.