On January 11, Interface News exclusively learned that Hou Deyang, the current vice president of Tencent Music Entertainment Group (hereinafter referred to as "Tencent Music"), is about to resign due to personal reasons, and the international business he is responsible for will be personally responsible for the group's CEO Liang Zhu.
According to informed sources, this time Liang Zhu personally led the international business, showing the importance that Tencent Music attaches to the product going to sea, and Tencent Music will continue to increase the exploration and investment of international business in the future.
In the organizational restructuring in June last year, Tencent Music formulated the core direction of the two major levels of content and platform, which is internally known as "one body and two wings". At the content level, a newly established content business line is responsible for the overall planning, strategy formulation and overall management of music content-related businesses, and based on the important role of content business in the overall group strategy, the newly established content business line is personally led by Peng Jiaxin, executive chairman of the group. At the platform level, on the one hand, a new long audio business line was established; at the same time, the "Interactive Video Department" was established under the QQ music business line, integrating qq music live broadcast with the national K song live broadcast team.
The adjustment of the management of the international business is a further integration measure of the entire Tencent Music under the "one body, two wings" strategy.
It and the recent QQ music overhaul, the adjustment of the organizational structure of Kuwo Music and the outbreak of innovative products such as TMELAND are the results of Tencent Music's continuous reform in the past six months.
International business continues to increase internal linkage with the content ecology of Tencent
On May 8 last year, Tencent Music sent an internal email announcing the adjustment of Hou Deyang, vice president of the group, which was no longer responsible for QQ Music, but instead served as an assistant CEO and the head of the offline international business department of QQ Music Business.
Hou Deyang is responsible for the international business department, which was formerly known as WeSing Product Center, and WeSing was formerly known as the National K Song International Edition. Initially, QQ Music incubated the target group of the business in southeast Asian markets, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.
In recent years, Chinese Internet companies have taken going to sea as one of the mainstream choices to break the bottleneck of growth, especially after the success of short video and game products, a large number of content products have begun to test the international market.
WeSing shoulders the heavy responsibility of promoting Chinese music content and culture to overseas markets, and has occupied the top three places in the Google Malaysia Professional Chart after its launch, ranking first in the philippine music and audio applications, which is a typical case of Tencent Music going overseas.
In the past year, Tencent Music has been increasing its linkage and cooperation with the content ecosystem of The Greater Tencent, focusing on content co-creation and upstream and downstream collaboration in the entertainment industry, and constantly exploring and innovating at the level of high-quality song production and diversified content mining and promotion.
At the beginning of January this year, the New Year's Eve concert on the WeChat video account was one of the joint cooperation projects between Tencent Music and WeChat teams, Tencent Video and other teams in music performance content.
Tencent Music, Tencent Pictures and other film and television production companies, music producers, etc. jointly launched the "Audio and Video +" alliance, and has cooperated with dozens of film and television works and more than 100 songs. In May last year, Tencent Music and Tencent Pictures also joined hands with Xinhua News Agency to jointly launch the theme song "International Song" of the movie "1921".
Tencent Music's "Big Play +" cooperation with games, animation and other businesses has also launched a large number of high-quality works in the past.
In the past year, Tencent Music has cooperated with many brands under Tencent Games to co-create music content, such as "League of Legends" mobile games, "Peace Elite" mobile games, "Glory of Kings" and other games, and have jointly produced promotional songs or theme songs such as "Big Time", "Flight Conductor" and "Time Knot", which continue to topped major music charts. Tencent Music and Tencent Video also jointly produced music works of well-known anime IP such as "Douluo Continent" and "Devouring Planet".
In the same year, QQ Music also jointly launched the world's first immersive audio entertainment game "QQ Music Starlight Town" with Robles, and held a virtual music festival in the game, providing users with exclusive special effects, fireworks, virtual gifts and mini music games in a 3D environment.
These innovative linkage measures with the content ecology of Big Tencent occurred intensively after the major adjustment of Tencent Music last year, and are also the result of the smooth implementation of the "one body, two wings" strategy.
QQ Music's video and youthfulness broke the game
According to Interface News, in the organizational structure adjustment of Tencent Music in June last year, a new interactive video product department was established. The business of this department covers QQ music live broadcast, national K song live broadcast, song room and video middle platform construction, with Ji Mingzhong (Mario) as the person in charge.
QQ Music's video attempt achieved some results in Q3 2021.
Judging from the financial report data, the penetration rate of QQ Music's short video section after the revision continued to grow, and as of the end of the third quarter, qq music's daily video views and daily independent visits to the platform reached 100 million and 18 million, respectively, with a growth rate of three digits.
In recent months, QQ Music's attempts and innovations in video have finally hatched the benchmark case of TMELAND at the end of the year.
It is the first virtual music carnival in China officially launched by Tencent Music, and launched its first event for users across the Chinese New Year's Eve on December 31, 2021. This online event includes elements such as digital twins, virtual performances, immersive experiences and social relationships, and already has the prototype of some "meta-universes", and is also a bold attempt by Tencent Music to explore innovative music interactive entertainment scenes for the future.
According to official data, a total of 1.1 million users entered the TMELAND Virtual Music Carnival on the night of the New Year's Eve, which is equivalent to 12 full concerts at the National Stadium (Bird's Nest), and nearly 100,000 people interacted online during the peak period.
TMELAND is led by the aforementioned interactive video department, which is incubated in the national K song and joins a large number of members of the QQ music live broadcast team.
TME live, an innovative performance brand launched by Tencent Music in 2020, has held more than 60 online concerts at an average frequency of at least once a week for more than a year, and it has also accumulated rich online live broadcast technology and experience for the launch of TMELAND.
In addition, in November 2020, Tencent Music also announced that it has reached an in-depth strategic cooperation with virtual performance operator Wave to jointly explore the blue ocean market for virtual concerts.
In the QQ Music 11.0 version update at the beginning of November last year, QQ Music slogan was upgraded to "Listen to What I Want to Hear", and with this brand language full of youthful personality, it is a series of innovative features such as M-PETS Music Pet, Happy Heart and Interactive Song List.
This is the first and largest iteration of young products in history after the domestic online music platform bid farewell to the era of exclusive copyright.
Based on the insight into the entertainment consumption needs of Gen Z users, the music pet function integrates the three elements of music, pets and social networking that young people like, so that users can get full emotional sustenance in the virtual world.
The Lexin function gives full play to Tencent Music's unique social advantages, allowing users to share the listening status and current mood in real time. Meet the needs of music fans to communicate and interact.
QQ Music has the world's leading PDM technology and intelligent distribution system, which ensures that the platform can accurately push different content to users with corresponding needs. The "user preference adjustment" function of this large version of the iterative update is also an attempt by Tencent Music to explore technological innovation.
In fact, the world's leading streaming platforms are becoming more technical: Spotify received a new technology patent last January, allowing it to analyze user sentiment, gender and age through voice recognition technology for music recommendation; Apple Music released spatial audio and lossless audio in June.
After the copyright competition entered the interoperability stage from the exclusive stage, the competition between Tencent Music and Companies such as NetEase and Byte not only expanded from the previous exclusive content competition to more aspects such as content diversification, ecological co-creation and the full-service system of the content industry chain at the content level, but also began to compete in more dimensions at the product level such as user experience, operational innovation and technology competition.
The Cool Music business line began to take on more business exploration work
In October last year, Kuwo Business established the Kuwo Platform Department offline, which is responsible for the planning, research and development, operation and commercialization of Kuwo music platform, car and polka dot music-related products, and is responsible for Liu Xiankai, head of Tencent Music Commercial Advertising and QQ Music Products. In January this year, Cool My PUBLIC RELATIONS team was also led by Chen Feifei, the current head of the marketing public relations team of QQ Music Business Line.
Under the transfer of tencent music's new management, Kumei further integrated with the strategic development of the group.
According to the official data, Kuwo Music has more than 1 billion installed users, more than 200 million monthly active users, more than 45 million daily active users, and more than 83% of young people under the age of 35 in the user market.
Therefore, under the existing product matrix of Tencent Music, Ku I is mainly responsible for exploring differentiated cutting-edge music entertainment products.
One of the most well-known cases is "Polka Dot Music", this product focuses on music + video, which is the main attempt of Cool Me at the level of music video. Users swipe up and down the main interface to cut songs, swipe left and right to select videos, and the operation experience is similar to that of popular short video platforms.
Polka Dot Music's users are younger and more urban, with users in second-tier cities and above accounting for more than 53.5%, of which 51.8% are female users. Official data shows that active users of Polka Dot Music rose more than 300% in the second quarter of last year.
After the adjustment, another strategic direction of cool me is the in-car audio entertainment scene.
Kuwo Music established the Automotive Division in 2016, based on Tencent Music's copyright resource advantages and perfect product service model, after more than 4 years of development, it has reached strategic cooperation with more than 60 auto brands.
As of September 2021, the number of users of The Cool My In-Car Entertainment System has exceeded 60 million, and the number of monthly active users of the In-Car APP has exceeded 30 million, making it a leading music entertainment provider in the car scene.
Kuwo Music is the first batch of partners in Huawei's Hongmeng auto machine OS ecosystem, providing it with a content library of "music + long audio", and Kuwo Music's unique lossless sound quality still has a competitive advantage in the car and machine scenarios. Judging from the results of the cooperation, Kuwo Music also won the award recognition of the best partner of Huawei's 2021 smart car solution.
Compared with competitors such as NetEase Cloud Music and ByteDance, Kuwo Music has an earlier product layout on the vehicle side, rich service experience, and a professional operation team inside to quickly adjust to the needs of car companies, which has brought great differentiated competitive advantages to Tencent Music and its Kuwo Music.
With the continuous implementation of the "one body, two wings" strategy, the integration of Kuwo Music and Tencent Music has gradually smoothed out, and the integration case of Kuwo Music can also provide more ideas and experience accumulation for other product lines to integrate into the group.