Image source @ Visual China
Text | The Tao always makes sense
The Chinese music scene is now becoming more and more fragile, and a little wind and grass can set off a mournful flood everywhere.
Just into December, the hearts of all fans have been hurt into slag again. Tencent Music Entertainment Festival announced the "Annual Top Ten Hot Songs", the short videos in the ten seats are full, look at the singer netizens look at each other, the chorus suddenly realizes, when the annual hot songs have become vibrato divine songs, the entire music scene is confused, only desperate.
This is not the first time that the Vibrato Divine Comedy has appeared in front of the mainstream with a high attitude, remember that before Jay Chou held a concert in Paris, the fans ordered a song "Learn to Cat Call", and the King of Heaven awkwardly cooperated to complete the fans' wishes after a moment of stunnedness. Divine Comedy is always overconfident, and even a song is often linked to the trend of the Internet, even if you meet Jay Chou, you can easily gain the upper hand by virtue of the differences of the times, as if those who have not heard the Divine Comedy are "dirt buns" in the social dust.
Since 2018, every once in a while there will be a bloodbath of the brainwashing of major short video platforms, and now, the annual hot song list has once again pushed the divine comedy to the cusp of the storm, it seems that it is only one step away from the circle and the death of the society.
It's not that the song is gone, it's "The man is gone."
For some reason, the old and new eras of the music world have gradually lost control in the process of change.
Compared with those hot songs that only recognize the song and do not recognize the name, what is more strange is actually the name that hovers in the forefront. In 2021, the last generation of myths in the Chinese music industry, Jay Chou, is over forty years old, and there are talents in the Jiangshan generation, and it is regrettable that after Zhou Dong, the successor is not the so-and-so or so-and-so that fans are familiar with.
Those successors either became niche or slaves to the flow. True singers who have the ability to become music stars have become scarce.
Last year, qq music 15th week hot song list, the top ten singers only one Li Ronghao is familiar with, Jay Chou and Cai Jianya and other powerful singers have not yet entered the top ten, the older generation of singers collectively fell into the hidden, the newcomer slaughtered the list but there is no gold content, the representative works are almost all divine comedies or saliva songs, making people cry and laugh.
It is undeniable that the Internet has accelerated the pace of ordinary people's exploration in any field, and has also greatly shortened the reaction distance of the circle, which is a good thing, but the fragmented dissemination of short videos has invisibly reduced a lot of hard conditions that could not be ignored before. The musical careers of Lin Junjie and Wang Lihong, who once supported half of the Chinese music scene before da hong, are obviously not reflected in this generation of musicians.
According to the "Report on the Survival status of Chinese musicians" released in 2020, the proportion of musician students is as high as 66%, and only 11% of full-time musicians, what is more interesting is that 70% of musicians have been engaged in music creation for less than 3 years, and 34% of musicians have been engaged in less than one year. In other words, these people will not be on the same dimension at all with the old singers.
It is reported that 71% of the post-95s and post-00s musicians are not interested in traditional singing, but are more enthusiastic about the national style, rap, electric tone and other young things. There is no doubt about this, even people who do not know anything about music can hear how obsessed this generation of young singers on the list of songs are obsessed with national style, rap and the like, like the previous "Mangsang" and "Red Zhao wish" just by looking at the lyrics can arouse a post-00s intracranial climax.
But there is also no lack of embarrassment, and the creation of the Divine Comedy is similar, and it is a "coincidence". NetEase Digital Reading has counted 50 douyin hot songs, and found that the repetition rate of the average lyrics is as high as 85%, and some of the more excessive ones are once close to 95%, and the songs are the same, the Divine Comedy is thousands, the chords account for half, and the songs written by the three sets of chords of universal chords, Canon chords and 1645 chords account for 73.33% of the Divine Comedy.
When the seniors stayed up late writing songs to stay up bald, they never thought that a song that was popular all over the Internet might only need to move the mouse for a few seconds. Sun Yanzi has become the "unpopular singer" in the mouth of the post-00s, and the speed of the so-called popular singers is comparable to the speed at which they write songs and compose songs.
In 2020, douyin music ecological data shows that in the second half of the year, the cumulative number of douyin musicians rose by more than 300 million, there were 6 musicians with more than 10 million fans, and 23 musicians with more than 5 million fans; the official data of Kuaishou also pointed out that in 2020, the number of active fans of music creators covered nearly 70% of Kuaishou DAU, and there were nearly 400 songs on the platform with more than 1 million uses.
The music scene has long changed, and fans have not begun to despair in the past two years.
However, the Internet continues to send talents to the music scene, although the good and bad are uneven, it is not necessarily all bad. The Divine Comedy breaks through layers of ground in the short video, which may also be an opportunity for veterans. It is true that short videos have won a lot of popular saliva songs, but there are not a few old songs that have been unknown for many years, and suddenly become popular with short videos.
The most classic example is "Kiss Everywhere" that accidentally became popular on Douyin Kuaishou last year, which is actually the work of Miriam Yang in 2004, and there is a long gap of 17 years from its appearance to its popularity. TikTok's "Ring A Ring" is a song that SHE released fifteen years ago. Coincidentally, several of Deng Ziqi's songs were later re-circled by short videos, such as "Painting" and "The Devil from Heaven", which once became the hottest short video BGM in the same period on Douyin.
To this day, the predecessors out of the new songs also began to bow to the social attributes, Deng Ziqi released a new album some time ago, just eat hot pot while singing in the live broadcast room, the new song "Period" was on the hot search that night, Xiao Yaxuan released a new song after four years of absence, and also rushed into the live broadcast room with her boyfriend. Thinking back to that year, the Stars of the Chinese music scene were brilliant, and now there are many new people, but unfortunately, the musical heritage has long been broken.
The commercial value of the Divine Comedy is decreasing, but it cannot withstand wave after wave
Can divine comedy really make money? This is one of the most concerned issues for many people.
In the era of mobile phone ringtones, the Divine Comedy is like a realistic version of the "cornucopia", and countless singers who are not accepted by the mainstream music market rely on saliva songs to achieve financial freedom and make money far beyond ordinary people's cognition. In 2014, Workers Daily reported that Daolang's "Lover", "Impulsive Punishment", and "The First Snow of 2002" were downloaded nearly 8 million times as CRBT, and the song was estimated to be 20 million yuan per song.
The beginning of the new century was the peak of the pop divine comedy. Pang Long's "Two Butterflies" earned the company 240 million yuan in one year, and in 2006, Pang Long ranked first in the Singer category of the Forbes Celebrity Fortune List, far more than many A-list singers at that time. Along with Xiang Xiang, who sang "Song of the Pig", and Wang Rong, who sang "I Am Not Huang Rong", also on the list.
In fact, most people have a certain deviation in their estimation of the commercial value of The Divine Comedy, and around 2005, the financial situation of the Divine Comedy singers absolutely crushed half of the Chinese music scene. Especially when the CRBT business reduces the dimensionality of the album profit, it should be known that the average annual download of a song "Above the Moon" of the Phoenix Legend is as high as 79 million times.
Although the era of color bells has now bid farewell, the business model of Divine Comedy has been largely preserved. This is not an empty wind, almost every stage of the Divine Comedy income is not bad, such as the first few years of shouting Mai fire, the head shouting Mai singer Tianyou in 2017 annual income of up to 20 million, the annual income of other people is also about ten million.
When the vibrato dominates the screen, the commercial income of Divine Comedy is only a lot more. According to the data released by the Tencent Musician Platform, the number of works played by the head singer Chen Xuening in 2019 is 6.29 billion, which is the first singer-songwriter of the year, with nearly 6.3 billion plays, 100 million plays is 200,000, the optical traffic share has been 13 million, plus membership packages, advertising shares, and prepayments, and other music copyright licensing fees, Chen Xuening's revenue in 2019 reached at least 20 million. Royalties for these songs and her future songs after 2019 are not included in this calculation.
As with the logic of mobile phone RINGT Divine Comedy download, wind evaluation is one thing, and it cannot stand the traffic. It is also worth noting that, frankly speaking, this is the biggest gap between the Divine Comedy and traditional songs, that is, the production cost, the production cost of the Divine Comedy can even be negligible.
Traditional record companies take about one to two years to produce an album, but Divine Comedy was born on the assembly line and can make more than 100 songs a week, and small companies with fewer personnel can produce one in two or three days. In a sense, hot music squeezes the artistic period of the entire music scene, and the notes no longer need to be polished.
It is reported that at least 100 new songs on Douyin are put into a huge traffic pool every day. Of course, most of the expenditure of divine comedy is marketing, and public reports show that it may cost 600,000 to 700,000 yuan for a song to be put on douyin now, and a higher one, such as the previous blockbuster "The Wind Blows" and "The Sea of Stars" Marketing expenses are more than one million.
But can the Divine Comedy continue to be so brilliant? At present, the growth environment of the Divine Comedy is quietly undergoing some inevitable changes, more bluntly, the explosive rotten street, the production routine is well known, and it is difficult for the new song to think of the circle. In the past two years, it has been difficult for songs on NetEase Cloud Music to reach 999+ reviews.
On the other hand, Shenqu has greatly reduced the threshold of the song world, and the number of musicians stationed in Douyin in the first half of 2020 increased by nearly 30,000, and the order volume of cover singers in the same period increased by 10 times compared with previous years, in contrast, the list time of popular songs was not more than half a month.
Music has become an entertainment FMCG, and in the long run, even the highest commercial value will be exhausted.
How does music relate to the chain of taste and contempt?
Taste is an extremely vague personal concept, but somehow anything can be associated with taste, especially music. Previously, I knew that there was a popular Q&A: "The blind date has good conditions in all aspects, but what if he likes to listen to the Phoenix Legend?" "Although the Phoenix legend is innocent, a cultural construct is highlighted.
The chain of popular music disdain is such that classical jazz rock electronic pop rap various kinds of saliva divine songs. Fans' identification or denial of any melody is ultimately the most straightforward identity between groups, and in a broad sense, most people are.
Previously, Tencent Research Institute once released a music social report, the report shows that the main motivation for people to share music is to share good resources and pass on values, of which 20% still share music as a display of taste style, but different from simply sharing, especially the contemporary young people who are obsessed with social networking.
It is not without sources to say that music preferences represent a person's taste, according to a study released at the UMAP International Conference, the orientation and choice of music genre is more or less related to personal personality hobbies. Peeking into someone's inner world through a song is undoubtedly a huge attraction for young people to make friends.
In the early European society, fans would choose to gather together because they liked the same piece, resulting in concerts and music festivals. The ultimate enjoyment of hearing can greatly satisfy the spiritual world, and to this day, a group of like-minded fans gathered around to listen to music is still one of the most critical attributes of music in real life.
According to the "2021 May Day Performance Observation" released by Damai Network, in just five days from May 1 to 5, there were 56 music festival performances across the country, more than 40% of Damai users chose to use the music festival as the entertainment choice for the holiday, and more than 60% were willing to plan a cross-city trip for the festival.
It seems that offline music sharing can further narrow the taste distance between people, and the face-to-face spiritual resonance represents that the defense of the music circle is still intact under the impact of the Internet, which is also a kind of spiritual comfort for fans. Why does the public look down on the Vibrato Divine Comedy? The reason is simple, the way the Divine Comedy was circulated broke the original rules of the musical kingdom, which were once put on the altar and revered for many years.
But the emergence of the Vibrato Divine Comedy steps on the rhythm of the Internet, just like the locust transit, anyone can subconsciously hum a few words, as long as the short video, can not escape being brainwashed by the Divine Comedy, everyone has no room to hide.
According to the 2018 Music Consumer Insights Report, 86% of users worldwide listen to songs through audio and video streaming, and 52% of them listen to music through video. Similarly, the "2020 China Online Music Industry Report" released by Fastdata Also shows that the use of online music has dropped by more than 50% month-on-month, and in the same time period, the use time of the Jitter Short Video Platform has increased by 72.9% month-on-month.
When the Divine Comedy is pervasive, people who listen to Mozart can also inadvertently sing two sentences of stepping on the mountains and rivers, although it is not active consciousness, it is forced by various network fragmented memories, but the sense of superiority that once occurred due to cognitive prejudice was shaken, and all the pots could only be memorized by the Divine Comedy.