Produced | Tiger Sniff Commercial, Consumer and Mobile Group
The author | Huang Qingchun
Caption image| IC photo
Fans brushed a wave of presence for Jay Chou.
On the evening of December 11, Jay Chou sang "Give Me a Song Time" + "I Don't Deserve" + "Quiet" + "Trajectory" in TMEEA (Tencent Music Entertainment Festival), although it is not a formal concert, but the youth memories of the 80s and 90s generations will also be awakened when the prelude to each song is played. Immediately, #Jay Chou yyds# topped the Weibo hot search list.
Not long before that, Apple Music announced the 2021 global major market music year-end charts, and 54 of the 100 songs with the highest number of views on the Chinese pop song chart came from Jay Chou; even, Jay Chou occupied 9 seats in the TOP10 songs. Many of the songs on the charts have been released for six or seven years, but in 2021 they still dominate the hottest songs of the year, and their dominance is terrifying.
In fact, a month forward, on the 21st anniversary of Jay Chou's debut, social media set off a wave of discussion: Why is the Chinese music scene only Jay Chou left?
Why is there a fault in Chinese music?
On November 7, 2000, Jay Chou's first album "JAY" came out, and on June 24, 2016, "Jay Chou's Bedside Story" was released - 16 years, 14 albums, which belonged to Jay Chou's golden age.
At that time, the Chinese music scene was full of flowers, in addition to Jay Chou, there were jacky Cheung, Eason Chan, Lin Junjie, Tao Zhe, Wang Lihong and other fierce generals; however, looking back at the present, Hong Kong and Taiwan newcomers were in disarray, Chinese music was declining like Hong Kong movies, and an era of music supremacy was gone.
Behind this is not only the industrial innovation promoted by the development of the times, but also the alienation and shrinkage of the ecological evolution of the music scene.
First of all, it is the music carrier that is innovating and evolving. Since "The Same Song" set off a wave of hot songs/golden songs, local satellite television has followed suit, and music variety shows have become a traffic password to grab ratings, and later slowly alienated into such a cultivation system as "draft".
Tv stations and video websites do the cultivation of users' minds and habits, and capital changes the music variety show through operation, which is more interactive and more entertaining, and even delegates the voting power to the audience outside the venue, and the music variety show has since been popular with david.
"Super Girl", "The Voice of China", "China Has Hip Hop" is undoubtedly a case of later peaking, these music variety shows will be created entertainment, competition system, the "show" part overshadows the creation and even singing itself, and even makes a good singing competition into a miserable competition - the contestants have to sell miserably before singing, vote to sell miserably, PK elimination to sell miserably.
Especially at present, there are incomplete statistics from the media, in 2021, various platforms and satellite TVs have launched nearly 50 music variety shows, and the number of head music variety shows such as "The Voice of China 2021" and "Brother Who Cut Through Thorns" has reached 14.
At the same time, the rising channel of singers is also quietly evolving, the Internet provides a broad stage and more spotlight, and the short video platform replaces the past channels such as radio, records and music APP, becoming a new carrier for songs to break through the circle.
According to the data, in 2020, the scale of short video users in China has reached 873 million, and the average person uses short video applications in a single day for 2 hours. When short videos become a weapon for netizens to "kill time", it is inevitable to eat away at the user time of music APP - according to the "2020 China Online Music Report" released by Fastdata Pole, short videos have become the second most important form of music promotion outside the music platform.
These "Divine Comedies" parasitize in the vibrato with hundreds of millions of daily active users as long as they bet on a certain melody, it is easy to break the circle layer by layer, especially those "Divine Comedy" that make people listen for a long time and exude a sense of worrying about the new words, calling the work is actually not accurate, and it may be more appropriate to call it a commercial assembly line "explosive single product".
A friend joked that they "can only sing and can't write, why should they be called singers, they should be called 'watch workers'." ”
Taking the annual top ten hot song list released by TMEA as an example, almost half of them have been popular in Douyin, more like a short video "killing time" cultural fast food condiments, the platform algorithm needs enough songs to capture user emotions, "Divine Comedy" will take the initiative to grasp the audience emotions when creating filler words, love, breakup, youth are high-frequency creative intentions, anyway, to cover the user's emotional needs to the greatest extent.
A whole set from production to consumption has become industrialized, humming once, singing the tune twice, and then brushing down will soon be brainwashed by the melody of the Divine Comedy. The reality of the dilemma is that users are accustomed to being fed by big data, aesthetics and discrimination are gradually decreasing, but it is difficult for them to realize this.
The "Shang Cain Society" believes that the causes of this phenomenon stem from two aspects:
"From the supply side, Chinese pop music originally started late, experienced a spurt of growth, mud and sand, capital to take advantage of the void, to promote music variety shows more and more frequent, can stand out of the musicians have long been out, too young also need to be in reality to come up with excellent works;
From the demand side, it is that the audience has long lost its freshness to the variety shows with aging models and full of routines, and still likes the old songs that really touch people's hearts, or directly go to the short video platform to brush songs with simple melodies and empty lyrics. ”
A few years ago, Li Zongsheng also mentioned in an interview that "what is worse and worse in the inland is that it is a spurt of growth, skipping the entire stage of fermentation and brewing, including the entry, screening and maturity of talents." After the industry began to have economic scale, a large number of speculators in other industries came in to do pop songs, so the entire pop music scene in the mainland was hollow and weak. ”
Times have changed, Jay Chou has not changed
In addition, the problem of "alienation" of the value of the internal ecology of the Chinese music scene cannot be ignored.
In recent years, there have been fans on Weibo carrying data such as Cai Xukun and Lu Han to battle Jay Chou, especially the domestic streaming media list is often slaughtered by various popular fresh meat lists.
Frankly speaking, this kind of battle means little - the flow of traffic is always flowing for small fresh meat, and Jay Chou can stand for 21 years and run through the youth of two generations, and the influence of the two is not the same.
Moreover, in Jay Chou's era, only excellent works, solid vocal basic skills, and talented songwriting ability can be said to occupy a place in major radio stations, music critics and music software. Nowadays, music variety shows are falsely prosperous, popular clicks, topics out of the circle is just a lively appearance, in essence, such programs are difficult to grow a unique newcomer like Jay Chou, as for the original songs with high singing degree, there are only a few.