Text | Xianjiang
Produced by | Tencent News Lichun Studio
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As 2021 draws to a close, everyone finally thinks of the "Chinese music scene" that has been silent for a long time. While the "verbal criticism" caused by the "Ten Hot Songs" has hammered the "Chinese music scene" to the skin, many people have suddenly found that the "Chinese music world" in their impression has now "changed its face".
Jay Chou is still dominating the list, Mayday, Eason Chan, Sun Yanzi and Lin Junjie are still singing, how can it be said that it is "unrecognizable"? However, compared with the "Chinese music scene" that people look forward to every year in the past, today's "Chinese music scene" is becoming more and more incomprehensible.
On the charts, except for a few familiar names, most of them are some unfamiliar screen names; all kinds of hot songs are brushed every three or five times, but everyone does not know who is listening; some people in the public opinion field are happy to miss the "fairy fight" twenty years ago, and some people regard Sun Yanzi as a "cold singer".
Sun Yanzi was regarded as an "unpopular singer" by young netizens and was on the hot search
Our understanding of "pop music" has never been so "divided", and some of the consensus that everyone once reached seems to have fallen apart. Ideas such as circle layering, traffic is king, and short videos are the way are popular, but in the end, various discussions do not point to the core of the problem: logical reorganization. After 20 years of development, the Internet is no longer the destroyer of the record industry, but the builder of the new music industry. The industrial chain of the traditional recording industry has been washed away by the Internet, and the entire music industry is being reconstructed around the Internet, and its underlying logic will inevitably be very different from the past. According to the data of ifPI, the International Association of the Phonographic Industry, in 2020, 90.3% of the revenue of China's recorded music industry will come from streaming media, and the consumption logic of streaming media is completely different from that of physical record consumption, and the logic of the physical record era is no longer applicable to the present. Moreover, in 2021, the underlying logic of China's music industry is still continuing to be reorganized, the payment rate of music streaming media exceeds 10% for the first time, the exclusive copyright model is canceled, the idol draft brakes sharply, and the influence of short videos on music dissemination is increasing... There are signs that some of the things that happen in 2021 will have a major impact on the future of Chinese pop music.
01 The hot song continues to be in power
At the end of 2021, the "Chinese music scene" brushed the screen, and from the word point of view, 90% of it was "ridicule" - "the Chinese music scene is dead", "the Chinese music scene changed its surname to shake", "the Chinese music world is finished" and so on. Brushing the screen itself can see the emotional trend of the network, and this emotion is related to "hot songs". "Hot songs" is not a phenomenon unique to 2021, and in the past three years, online hot songs have flooded major charts. The "hot song" of 2021 is just a continuation of this trend. From the beginning of the year to the end of the year, songs such as "White Moonlight and Cinnabar Mole", "The Sea of Stars", "The Wind Blows", "You Who Love 105 ° C", "So Many People in this World", "Mohe Ballroom" and other songs have become popular, which constitutes our basic impression of Chinese pop music in 2021.
"2021 Tencent Entertainment White Paper" 2021 annual new song popularity TOP10
It is generally believed that "hot songs" are related to the popularity of short videos. Comparing the qq music hot song list and the vibrato list, we will also find the correlation. In fact, there have been a lot of gameplay decoding in the promotion of related works, and the active use of "short videos" has also become an important part of the publicity of some music companies. Karen Mok's "So Many People in This World", Wang Yuan's "Meteors Have Fallen for You" and Manshuk's "Slow Heat" have all benefited from this.
Karen Mok's "So Many People in this World" is the top 10 for the new songs in 2021, and the professional reputation of the new songs is top 1
The new trend in 2021 is that "short videos" have finally begun to "upstream" after many years of "sinking": in the past, "short video publicity" was more used by small teams with the goal of "sinking market", and now, large companies and mainstream artists in the upstream of the industry have also begun to emphasize short videos.
In the past year, the music industry has fully entered the short video, from mainstream singers to rock bands, from small labels to large companies, which has not only spawned "net red bands" like Mayuan Poets, but also promoted the development of short video publicity in the direction of specialization. This may also be related to the restriction of offline activities caused by the epidemic, and the entire industry has to rely heavily on online operations, which has promoted the popularity of short video publicity. Some insiders reflect that as short video publicity becomes more and more professional, the cost of song publicity on short videos is also getting higher and higher, which may change the publicity strategy of some teams, and may even change the short video publicity mode, which in turn will affect the development of the music industry.
02 Mediocre music variety show
The data shows that in the past five years, the number of music variety shows has shown a downward trend, especially in 2021, the three heavyweight programs of "Singer", "Summer of the Band" and "China New Rap" have been suspended, casting a shadow on the music variety market in 2021. But the bigger negative impact comes from the sharp brakes of the draft variety show. In May 2021, a milk dumping incident not only brought the idol talent show to a halt, but also made other variety shows no longer create topics in terms of publicity as in previous years.
The phenomenon-level music variety show "Summer of the Band" was discontinued
Whether it is a music variety show or a talent show variety show, it is a basic routine to trigger hot discussions through "hot search", and the huge traffic brought by "hot search" can not only enhance the attention of the program itself, but also bring more fans to the artists involved in the filming of the program. With the cooling of the draft, coupled with the logic of Weibo adjusting the hot search list, the publicity ideas of variety shows are also changing accordingly, with more emotional topics and fewer controversial topics. Then again, publicity is just the finishing touch, content is the source of wood, whether a variety show can succeed, in the final analysis, depends on content, not publicity. Observing the cases of popular music variety shows in the past few years, we will find that behind the fermentation of all "hot spots", there is a corresponding content to undertake. The music variety show in 2021 is also not lacking in content innovation, and the direction of innovation shows a trend of polarization, one pole is youth, the other is nostalgia. Either pole, content innovation is being tried, but the results are very different. "Tomorrow's Creative Project", "The Man from Strawberry Planet", "Teen Rap Project", "Black Afraid Girl" and "Do You Listen to My Music" target Generation Z (post-95-00 generation), and they also have new ideas in form, but the response is mediocre. Instead, variety shows such as "Brother With Thorns", "Time Concert" and "Our Song" that played nostalgic cards splashed some water.
2021 annual music variety show popularity TOP10
Looking at the development of the music industry at home and abroad, variety shows play an important role in "star-making" and "song dissemination", and the Chinese music scene that urgently needs to replenish fresh blood needs music variety shows to open up performing space for the younger generation. Generation Z has become the main audience of the entertainment market, and the rejuvenation of variety shows will still be a trend, and the problem is how to adapt content innovation to the audience experience. In contrast, "slow variety shows" and "mass variety shows" with more stories to tell are more easily accepted by the market, especially in the context of the epidemic, the audience needs to slow down and need songs that can heal the heart.
03 Rethinking the "Fan Economy"
With the announcement of the suspension of work by Wang Lihong, a former "quality idol", 2021 has also been a "year of collapse". Before Wang Lihong, a number of head artists have "collapsed the house", and they have collapsed to the entertainment circle. "Collapsed house" was originally a star-chasing girl who expressed sadness after learning that Aidou was in love, and now it is often used to refer to the collapse of generations, the collapse of the image, and the subsequent collapse of the dreams of fans. The collapse of idols has also had a subtle impact on the music industry. In the past few years, the "fan economy" has prevailed, focusing on social operations and creating "traffic stars" with the help of idol talent shows, which has not only brought "top streams" to video platforms and Weibo, but also sold hundreds of millions of digital albums for music platforms. In 2020, Xiao Zhan's digital single sold 140 million yuan in sales, setting a staggering sales record. "Draft brakes" and "idol collapse" poured two basins of cold water on the "fan economy", the idol draft of the "traffic star" was suspended, the strict requirements for rational consumption at the policy level also reset the digital album consumption mode of the music platform, and users can no longer repeat consumption without restrictions as in the past. The "fan economy" built by digital accumulation has been questioned a lot in recent years, and the lack of excellent professional skills and representative works has made "traffic stars" criticized by people, and the "play" of the platform inducing fans to rush is not conducive to the healthy development of the industry.
In fact, it is not the "fans" who really support the development of the industry, but the vast number of subscription (monthly) users.
According to IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, in 2020, the total revenue of China's recorded music industry was 790 million US dollars, or about 5.1 billion yuan. Streaming subscription and advertising revenue accounts for 90.7% of the revenue of China's recorded music industry, of which streaming subscription revenue accounts for 46% of total revenue, and it is still growing rapidly.
According to the financial report released by Tencent Music, in the third quarter of 2021, Tencent Music's online music service paid users reached 71.2 million, and the payment rate reached 11.2%, and what kind of content and services are provided for 71.2 million paying users is what music platforms need to focus on.
From the "2021 Tencent Entertainment White Paper"
Regardless of content and services, blindly pursuing data "good-looking", in the end can only be a mirage. Nowadays, the platform has begun to adjust its business ideas, raising "content" and "service" to an unprecedented height, which is actually a kind of logical reorganization, from rushing "quantity" to heavy "quality".
04 A new exploration of online performances
Although in individual periods in 2021, the offline performance market once recovered its vitality, due to the recurrence of the epidemic, the offline performance market has a strange phenomenon of "busy official announcement in the first half of the year, busy canceling in the second half of the year", and it is foreseeable that before the full normalization of public life, the offline performance market is still facing greater pressure. The "capriciousness" of the offline performance market also has an impact on online performances. One possible reason is that in the hope of the epidemic improving, artists are more willing to focus on offline, in addition, after last year's practice, online performances are less cost-effective, which may also affect the enthusiasm of the industry.
2021 annual online concert popularity TOP10
Online performances in 2021 are focused on mainstream artists with high attention and idol groups with large fan bases, and emphasize eventivity. For example, Lin Junjie's "Sanctuary Finale" online concert at TME live was based on the final stop of his tour, and Twins' online performance focused on the 20th anniversary concept. Online performances by Adele, Ed Sheeran and Lai Meiyun are all promotional for the new album. Due to the high cost of online performances, online performances without special "selling points" seem to be unsustainable, and mainstream artists' online performances increase revenue by cooperating with commercial brands to cover part of the cost, while more artists are reduced to zero and play short videos.
TME live Mayday "suddenly want to see you" online concert
Short video platforms are also trying to innovate online performances, and the vertical screen live broadcast that needs to be paid to watch such as Zhang Huimei and Sun Yanzi has brought some new ideas to the online performance market in 2021, but at present, it seems that it is still only a case and has not formed a climate. The online performance fever in 2020 once made some industry insiders think that it is possible to subvert the performance market, but from the development trend of 2021, online performances at this stage are only a supplement to the traditional market, not a replacement. So far, the immersive experience of the online performance market is far from satisfactory, and the "logical reorganization" of the performance market may have to wait until new technologies such as XR (Extended Reality) have reached a mature stage, and at present, the most anticipated thing is still to return to offline.
05 Copyright Change
From an industry perspective, the most important "logical restructuring" of China's music industry in 2021 is the cancellation of the exclusive copyright model. Although this may not change the industry landscape in the short term, the iron plate has begun to loosen, and the gap in competition has widened. The exclusive copyright model is a special product of the process of Chinese Internet music legalization, which raises the long-term low value of music copyright, promotes Internet music payment to a certain extent, and also brings some negative effects, such as restricting music dissemination and market competition.
Copyright and music platforms have a lip-to-ear relationship. As mentioned above, China's music industry is highly dependent on the Internet for revenue, and in turn, music platforms are highly dependent on the supply of copyrighted content. Therefore, the market game around "copyright" has attracted special attention in the music market in recent years. In January 2021, Shrimp Music ceased to serve, and there is a view that Shrimp Music is a victim of "exclusive copyright". Looking at the global music industry, "exclusive copyright" is just an isolated case, not a rule. Therefore, the cancellation of exclusive copyright is to return the copyright market to the convention, so that music platforms can focus more on providing users with better content and services. Judging from the development trend in the second half of 2021, music platforms are indeed strengthening "content" and "service". In terms of content, music platforms are strengthening in-depth cooperation with the industry and improving their competitiveness in original content; in terms of services, several major music APPS on the market have a large degree of product updates, and the general direction is to highlight their personalized services. Copyright changes affect not only platforms, but also copyright owners. Along with the cancellation of "exclusive copyright", there are also high prepayments, which means that copyright owners need to adjust their business ideas and strengthen their content development capabilities. In addition, some new players are also eager to move, there is news that there will be a new music APP launched in the domestic market early next year. The far-reaching effects of copyright change may not be apparent until a few years later, but the "logical restructuring" in 2021 will inevitably bring more variables to the Chinese music industry in the next decade.
(Source: Tencent News)
* Part of the image is from the internet, and the cover image is from Visual China