"The Chinese music scene seems to be really finished", "The age of the soul wearing color bells", "No song name has ever been seen, but I have heard it"...
Even if you're not a 5G surfer teenager or a music lover, you've probably heard of the TEMA Tencent Music Entertainment Festival a few days ago.
The reason for the circle is not the weight of the awards, nor how star-studded the guests are, but a list of the "Top Ten Hit Songs of the Year" that is surprising enough to close.
On closer inspection, none of the song titles or singers are familiar to the eye. But as soon as the music starts, your brain will be like being held hostage, listening to the first half of the sentence can't help but hum the second half of the sentence - because, all, it is, TikTok Divine Comedy!
The front may be full of critical hits, but please keep watching!
Don't Laugh: TikTok Divine Comedy Dominates the Chart, Essentially "The People's Choice"
How did the good annual top ten hot songs be "slaughtered" by the vibrato divine song?
In the shock and mourning of social networks, the winners such as "Clouds and Seas", "White Moonlight and Cinnabar Moles", "Prodigal Gossip", "Dreams That Can't Wake Up" and so on began to be ridiculed by the group: earthy saliva songs, old-fashioned melodies, and even plagiarism tailors... The Chinese music scene is really finished!
What's even more ironic is that the scene arranged a skewer performance for the top ten hit songs, and each song appeared for 15 seconds. Without sound cards and tone repairs, the singers of the Douyin Divine Comedy were described by poisonous tongue netizens as "public executions" with one mouth, and even "even campus singers can't compare" "Let me go, I'd rather listen to traffic stars sing!"
Top 10 hot songs live skewers, Double Kill!
The public account "Dr. X" said in a tweet that "congratulations to the Chinese music scene back to the era of color bells", and pointed out that the biggest contradiction in this hot song list is that the songs are shoddy but highly disseminated.
What are the characteristics of CRBT music? Subject to the length of time, so can only fire a few choruses, the melody must strive to catch the ear brainwashing, the lyrics must be simple and brainless...
People wouldn't have thought that one day CRBT would dominate 100% of a certain chart on the Chinese Music Awards stage.
Mobile phone color rings, tears of the times
After listening to the 10 skewers, do you also think of the "Mouse Loves Rice" and "Two Butterflies" that once brushed the screen? Have you ever wondered why this is?
The top ten hot songs of the year are supposedly the most trafficked music on the Internet. How did these originally unknown songs appear in front of people's eyes and be played, shared, liked or collected? Who is recommending? Who is spreading?
That's right, it's the short video algorithm.
In the past, a song became popular from a radio DJ or music chart recommendation, followed by a surge in album (CD or tape) sales, and finally a street play. The emergence of short videos completely disrupted this set of operations - 15 seconds, first from the short video platform to start the virus spread, and then it is a multi-line development, while conquering social networks, dominating the major music platforms, and entering the offline.
In other words, occupy the ears of short video platform users, and you have most of the Internet.
The New York Times recently reported that a ByteDance engineer wrote a document exposing some of the inside story of TikTok's algorithm. A brief video rating formula is listed in the file:
P likes * V likes + P comments * V comments + E play time * V play time + P play * V play
Engineers say the formula makes predictions based on machine learning and your actual user behavior, scores all videos, and then pushes the highest-scoring video to you (the formula actually used is more complex, but the logic behind it is the same).
In the context of the Douyin Divine Comedy, every time you like, comment, or repeatedly use a certain song, the algorithm is all in your eyes. It is the more than 600 million Douyin users who are active every day who are voting with their behaviors, turning the Internet celebrity saliva song into the "people's choice".
Compared with the previous top-down music transmission path, such a result is bound to be more sinking, more straightforward, and more drooling. To put it bluntly, the top ten hot songs of the year are just the result of big data advocacy.
In terms of melody and lyric quality, today's "Clouds and Sea", "White Moonlight and Cinnabar Moles" are almost indistinguishable from "Mice Love Rice" and "Two Butterflies" of that year. Perhaps the biggest change is that we still had the patience to listen to three or five minutes, and now we can only hum a 15-second chorus.
Listen to songs for 15 seconds, write songs for blockbusters, and short videos ruin the music industry?
It is said that the Chinese music scene is going to be finished, can you blame short videos and algorithms?
On the one hand, short videos and algorithms are quite innocent. They simply find the greatest common denominator of user preferences, accidentally expose the fact that most people listen to singing songs, and dig up and amplify this popular taste.
But on the other hand, neither short videos nor algorithms can excuse themselves. Not only do they make you addicted, using dopamine content to "spoil" you, but also through the brush brush mechanism, your fast food culture consumption habits become fragmented.
Pictured from Giphy
As a listener, do you remember the last time you were curious about music and explored everywhere to discover new songs? Remember when you went to the video store to buy a delicate CD, and listened to it from beginning to end and then tasted it?
This kind of experience of frequent trial and error, big waves of sand and sand to find gold, is probably rare now.
It stands to reason that in this era of information explosion at your fingertips, people's choice of music has become more free. You can listen to hip-hop reggae, jazz classical, psychedelic electronic music, from ancient times to the present, from far and near, each circle can find its own soul. But when you are too lazy to choose, give the choice to the algorithm - friends, listening to songs can also have information cocoons.
Pictured from Unsplash
The single-celled thinking of "judging whether a song is good or not in 15 seconds" not only devours listeners, but also affects creators in the music industry.
In November, Adele released her new album 30. In an interview with Apple Music, she mentioned that during the production of the album, the team had many discussions with her about the topic of "TikTok".
Do you want to make changes to the popular trend of short videos? The team believes that it is necessary to let the teenager who plays TikTok know who she is. But Adele says his music isn't for 12-year-olds, it's too deep, and it's more for ages 30 or 40 who have some experience, healing and strength.
If everyone is making songs for TikTok, who's going to make music for our generation? Who's going to compose music for my peers?
See watermark for image source
For the global music industry, short video platforms have indeed become an unavoidable topic.
It allows the unknown generation to create a network-wide hit, become the first in The Spotify, Apple Music and other charts, and even have the opportunity to appear on the Grammy stage; it can make the old songs that are considered outdated to be revived, let niche music find their own audience, and also provide a channel for big-name singers to be closer to fans.
Lil Nas X, a rapper who became popular from TikTok and later signed a record label to debut and won various Grammy MTV awards, is only 22 years old this year.
According to the recently released "2021 TikTok Annual Music Report", on TikTok, about 430 songs have been video played more than 1 billion times this year, and the hottest one has been played nearly 20 billion times.
The traffic and likes from TikTok users also play a role outside the platform — the data shows that more than 175 TikTok hits will make the Billboard Top 100 singles chart in 2021, double last year's number.
TikTok 2021 Top 10 Global Hits
It is no secret that short video platforms are hyped up and created music.
According to Business Insider, TikTok has a music department within it that works closely with major record labels and monitors music trends on the app on a daily basis. The team has a series of measures to increase the popularity of a song — such as adding the track to a playlist or setting up keywords to increase the likelihood that the song will be searched.
Industry players such as record companies have spent their time studying the traffic passwords of short video platforms.
For a new song to promote, find 20 bloggers to pay for content. Let the singer cooperate in the early flow of some new song clips to arouse the user's interest. Keep an eye on the hot search topic trends on TikTok or Douyin, so that its singers can join the interaction at any time...
In order to cause the spread of the virus on the short video platform, some music companies have targeted "blockbusters" in the production stage. Shouldn't it be added to a remix that young people like? Adopt more blunt lyrics? Or adapt it into a fast-paced dance song for secondary creation? The birth of a "vibrato divine comedy" even takes only 2 hours to get up.
Some TikTok divine comedy collections on YouTube
For musicians, short video platforms are opportunities, but also cruel and helpless.
In August this year, Tencent Video's music variety show "Tomorrow's Creation Plan" was launched, and the format of "30 seconds to determine the quality of a song" was adopted in the preliminary selection stage, and several program instructors had a brief discussion on this.
Singer Deng Ziqi believes that in the fast-paced Internet era, this is indeed a problem that singers have to ponder, "but excellent works should be excellent enough in every place, since they can't change the environment, they should respond with high quality."
Gojo said that when they wholesale records in the past, they also tried to judge whether a song should be purchased based on 30 seconds. Of course, there is still a chance of rollover.
Perhaps everything is convenient today with the development of science and technology, but in our lives, the time left for art appreciation is also constantly compressed. If we can, let's leave a little more time for the music. Right？
Tomorrow's Creative Project
This is a common problem for creators and listeners.
Instead of complaining that the short video platform has ruined the Chinese music scene, feeling that youth has passed away, and urging a certain milk tea lover surnamed Zhou to produce a new album every day, it is better to think about what we can do to change the status quo.
Can musicians jump out of the cage of short-sighted thinking such as "blockbusters", at least no longer be framed by the 15-second chorus routine, and can output three or five minutes of complete and original music narrative? Can listeners take the initiative to listen to songs other than those recommended by the algorithm, less traffic for the Vibrato Divine Comedy, and use thinking and behavior to resist the domination of the algorithm?
The views of music blogger @Dumbo are perfect for ending today's discussion:
In this day and age, every click we make is a vote for the world we want.
Share and talk about the things you like as much as you can. Instead of looking at the dark side to create chains of contempt, see if we snub the highlights that should be noticed. If you are silent, the space to speak is naturally someone else's.
Click "Watching"
It is the greatest motivation for us