Image source @ Visual China
Text | Music Herald (ID: nakedmusic), author | Echo, author: Fan Zhihui, Titanium Media is authorized to publish
"About the past, present and future of the Sea of Oranges – everything will be presented here."
Last month, Orange Sea announced on Weibo that their official website was officially launched. Although this is more common in foreign countries, it is rare for musicians to build their own websites in China, and many people will also think: "In 2021, who will log on to the website to understand the information?" ”
Indeed, compared with the link jump on the PC side, the mobile APP is more convenient, smooth and all-encompassing. Especially on various social platforms, watchlists and algorithmic recommendations are filled with a variety of music information. However, the information flow on these platforms is like a high-speed rotating drum, the previous one runs over the next, from one musician to another, often shallow taste, leaving too many impressions.
For musicians, the advent of the social media era has given them more opportunities to reach the public and ways to become popular. They settle in and "rent" to settle down, but the time and space are often very limited, and in the torrent of information, they have to do all kinds of "whole work" to catch some traffic.
Compared with the "renting" style, musicians build their own websites like "buying a house", which is an attempt to present their people and music more autonomously and comprehensively. As a path operated by musicians in the era of self-media, it is independent of the platform, but it is not the goal, and the essence is the IP attempt after accumulating a certain number of fans and works.
More importantly, "buying a house" is easy to "supply a house" is difficult, and not everyone can afford to buy a "house".
What is the use of building your own music website?
Click into the website of the Orange Sea, the mouse immediately changes into a white bubble, stops in different plates, there is a different picture.
"TOUR Tour" is a reflection of black figures in the cyan waters, "MUSIC Music" is the cover of their album "The Tide Goes Ashore", and the light blue waters spread to the ink blue coast. The oceanic page design and floating cursor fit their band style perfectly. The consistency of visual image is the premise of IP.
The website section is divided into performance information, music albums, surrounding malls, music videos, schedules and timelines, and there is a widget in the lower left corner of the page that collects fan email addresses. In addition, you can also link directly to social media pages such as Weibo, Facebook and Youtube through the website. Overall, this is a visually packaged integration of the band's business and communication channels through the tool of the website, but there is not much to see.
It is worth mentioning that the album purchase within the website is supported by the foreign music e-commerce platform bandcamp, which has less commission, and fans can voluntarily pay more money than the list price, and the surrounding sales are supported by domestic Taobao. However, it is understood that foreign music website creation tools generally provide the function of selling products within the website.
In foreign countries, there are many such musicians' self-built websites, well-known musicians include Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, etc., and there are many independent musicians. Take, for example, Eric Haugen, a North Carolina guitarist and instructor who sells guitar lessons on his website and provides personal guitar instruction virtually. There's also Toronto-based singer-songwriter Steve Benjamins, who specializes in creating music that can be linked to a variety of emotional states, using the website to fully visualize his music.
The main reason why foreign musicians have built more self-built websites may be related to their more mature music website building tools. Custom modules, on-site sales of products, and email registration widgets are the basic features, and wix, Bandzoogle, and Squarespace are used more often.
Among them, Wix's online store is not only commission-free, but also has a large number of statistics and analysis at your fingertips to help musicians monitor performance and adjust their marketing methods; Bandzoogle is a website creation tool specifically for musicians, and its website is also suitable for mobile and can work seamlessly on all devices; Squarespace is characterized by unlimited storage space and bandwidth, where you can update messages, upload music and videos without worry.
All three platforms cost around 10-20 euros/month, as well as free production tools like Music Glue, which focuses on e-commerce, which offers a variety of marketing ideas but requires a 10% commission; and Difymusic, designed by music industry professionals, but with a small range of features.
Creating a website in the country is also simple, but there are almost no tools dedicated to making music websites, which also limits this type of demand. Correspondingly, in recent years, the self-operation awareness of domestic musicians has also been greatly enhanced, covering various platforms such as streaming media, short videos, B stations, and Microblogs, and has also made many wonderful cases.
From "renting" to "buying a house", musicians in the era of self-media operate
The operation of musicians in the era of self-media is the most common on social platforms, such as the musician's homepage on Weibo, which is open and extensive, and is the primary choice for releasing the latest information, and Weibo has also become a music fan distribution center with super words.
Weibo itself has unlimited diversified sharing forms, and in line with the fragmented reading of the daily scene embedding, many musicians have developed the habit of sharing life fragments on Weibo, and through fixed hashtags to form a sustainable small column, such as Mao Buyi #Mao Not Easy Xiaowang Diary#, Lang Lang #Lang Music Playground #, Tao Zhe's #Life Zhexue#, Yuan Yawei's #TTTV#, earlier cases have Xue Zhiqian as a duanzi hand as a music diversion, successfully "curve to save the country".
The second wave of self-media comes from the WeChat public account, which is also a new stage of musician operation, characterized by story-based communication, which is more private than Weibo, but based on the social sharing mechanism, there is the potential to form social hotspots.
In the musician's self-built public account, second-hand roses can be called benchmarks, and so far 434 original articles have been published, with meticulous classification. The rich material stems from the fact that the lead singer of the band, Liang Long, is a cross-border master spanning music, variety shows, film and television, beauty and other fields, among them, Liang Long's video talk column alone has "A Serious Book" and "Liang Baikai", and the content is almost all-encompassing from classic interpretation to imitation makeup sharing. Recently, they also opened a WeChat video account, and the first video had 13,000 likes.
At the end of 2019, Zhang Weiwei, who created "Rice Shop", announced the suspension of performances and related work, and began to write public accounts as a new media editor, hoping to "have some new expressions here". Subsequently, the folk musician began to share his essays, poems, and some occasional insights. Compared with the distinctive characteristics of other self-media, the graphic form of WeChat public account articles is the depth of expression and the space of complete narrative.
The reason why the "Mohe Ballroom", which exploded not long ago, can attract attention with the sad and heavy story behind it is not only the sound and picture collocation of tens of seconds on the short video, but more from the literary story "Goodbye Evening Star" written by Liu Shuang for the song on his public account. Although the short video is promoted by the "only words" in it, it is also because of the strong emotional energy contained in the long narrative itself.
In addition, there are all kinds of musicians who rely on music visualization on B stations and short video platforms to accumulate popularity. However, due to the different properties of the platform, if it is impossible to form a sticky connection with fans, the presentation of musicians is often very limited. After all, the operation of musicians is about persistence and integrity, with the purpose of deepening audience awareness and strengthening impression management. In contrast, the community ecology of Station B will be relatively friendly.
For example, the Phoenix legend that flourished in Station B has now become a new top stream in the music district by accelerating its integration into the "whole life" atmosphere of Station B since it entered Station B last May. Among them, the "Classic Track MV" series integrates a small theater and a cutout MV, deepens its grounded "square dance special combination" image in the "self-deprecation" caused by 5 cent special effects, and then plays the stem of classic film and television dramas, continuously "remakes" the "climbing" bridge section in "The Hidden Corner", the classic fragments in "The King of Comedy" and "Please Answer 1988".
In addition to playing terriers, many musicians have tried a lot of effective new ways to publicize, such as the band "Emoji Bank" has opened an attempt to make self-made music variety shows. After the outbreak of the epidemic the year before, they first gave birth to the idea of "Nothing to Be Wrong", each issue used less than 10 minutes to adapt a well-known song, showing the whole process of adaptation; and then they made their own music review program "German Music Fans Watch Le Xia", the first episode of the program has received 1.11 million views, more than 20,000 praises, and many praises. Today, they have gained 100,000 fans on the B station.
There is also a relatively heavy operation method - artist fan APP. Previously, Xu Song, Han Geng, Huang Zitao, Zheng Shuang, Xue Zhiqian, Jay Chou, etc. have all been launched, but the cost is high, from development to follow-up iterative updates, operation and maintenance need to continue to invest, not friendly to independent musicians.
It can be seen that by "renting" on major social platforms to do self-media operations, many musicians have played very slippery. Judging from the "buying a house" behavior of the orange sea self-built website, its focus may not be on how fun and effective the operation of such musicians is, but more free and comprehensive. Self-built websites are a further manifestation of the operational potential of musicians in the era of self-media, but whether it is "renting" or "buying a house", having your own side of the world is a happiness that musicians have never had in the past.
As Emoji Bank wrote in "A Little Thought on the End of the Chinese Music Scene": "The beautiful thing about our time is that we will not monopolize the discourse power of the so-called 'authoritative media', and everyone is a small self-media, exuding influence from each other... Our big net can net the faint stars in the most inconspicuous corners, and the shadows of the beacons of the last era are pitch black. ”
Getting rid of the platform is a pseudo-proposition, but musicians need to have their own land
From the perspective of the operating trend of musicians in the era of self-media, the biggest feature of self-built websites is that it is a type of creator economic model that gets rid of platform dependence, releases information without platform restrictions, masters its own data, and there is no third party to take a profit from it. At the same time, it can also enhance the vitality of the fan community, provide one-stop music consumption, and the collection of fan emails also maintains direct contact with fans in the lightest and most stable way.
However, being platform-independent is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Creating a website is simple, but it's hard to keep it running and forming closed-loop revenue. This kind of private domain traffic gathering requires not only a solid fan base, but also a sufficiently diverse music product. Moreover, public domain traffic that is separated from social platforms is also difficult to achieve diversion and conversion.
Previously, the tour information on Weibo was sandwiched and triggered a hot discussion in the industry, although the platform promised to rectify, but each link in the music industry value chain actually has various types of platforms to form an entrance hegemony. The information barriers formed by the increasingly fierce platform competition also restrict the circulation of musicians' information and products, and self-built websites seem to provide a feasible method, but it is bound to be difficult to become mainstream.
Due to the low full-time rate of domestic independent musicians, many people do not have the energy and budget to promote themselves, and relying on the platform is still the most cost-effective way. Although there are many channels for musicians to operate, whether it is music e-commerce, creator economic platforms or self-built music websites, the corresponding professional tools are lacking.
From the perspective of content output, in order to continue to produce enough attractive and personalized content, this is undoubtedly a huge challenge for musicians, not to mention the difference between graphics and video, but also to take into account the different platform attributes to adjust.
Of course, the fundamental reason may be that in the era of traffic economy, getting rid of the platform may be a false proposition. Some scholars pointed out that we have entered the "platform society", that is, the Internet platform has built a complete digital social space through data and algorithms from the aspects of information, social, entertainment, business and so on. Since platform-based enterprises can concentrate almost all customer traffic, downstream producers can only win traffic by providing products that adapt to the characteristics of the platform, and musicians have to adapt to the rules of the platform while using the platform.
But it is precisely because of this that in addition to the bustling traffic and the platform of short-term contact, it is more necessary to create a musician's own place.
As mentioned above by musician Steve Benjamins, he summed up his motivation for creating a dedicated website as follows: "Here as long as you are sincere, you can go light. This may also be the original intention of many musicians at present to do their own operation tirelessly.