Text | Garlic gel horn
In the past 2021, the changes in the music industry and the market are big and small, the big is that in this year, the "long-sick" shrimp rice ushered in a complete farewell to the historical stage, and NetEase Cloud Music finally successfully listed at the end of the year after experiencing twists and turns, the small thing is that no matter where the competition of digital music platforms goes, the most popular music on the market is still not decided by these platforms like the previous two years.
Tencent Music may not have thought that its 2021 top ten hot songs released according to platform data will trigger such a big market response, and people even discuss whether the Chinese music scene is going to end. However, it should be a good thing that the market has such a high degree of attention, which will stimulate the entire industry to think about how to deliver more good music content to the market while looking for a second growth curve and new competitiveness.
The two compete with the latecomers
After the shutdown of Shrimp Music, the digital music industry has officially entered the two-strong pattern, and Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music have once again stood at the starting line of the second half with their respective strengths.
Rationally, NetEase Cloud Music survived the fierce copyright war, but the copyright disadvantage it was in before was an indisputable fact, fortunately, in July 2021, the State Administration of Market Supervision once again shot, which made the digital music industry completely out of the war of attrition of only the number of copyrights, and turned into the era of spelling services, which also gave NetEase Cloud Music the opportunity to play its own advantages.
In the second half of the process, the music community that NetEase Cloud Music has been emphasizing is undoubtedly its killer skill aimed at the new generation of users, a good music social atmosphere, a large number of young original musicians, so that the post-90s group has become the main user group of NetEase Cloud Music, and having a good feeling of young people will indeed win more possibilities for NetEase Cloud Music.
At the same time, Tencent Music has followed its own advantages accumulated in the upstream of the industry, strengthened the value of leading musicians in the Chinese music scene, mobilized the fan economy and covered all-age users through product functions and online concerts, and marched towards the service market. This also gradually reveals the differentiated route of the two giants of the current digital music industry.
As rivals who have been competing with each other for a long time, in the past 2021, it is still difficult to say who loses and who wins. NetEase Cloud Music is accelerating the pace of cooperation with the upstream, and has reached different types of cooperation with the world's three major record companies, Tencent Music is also using its QQ music, national K song and other products to continue to strengthen the "arrest" of the Z generation's attention, although both sides have their own main characteristics, but also in the direction of diversification.
However, short videos can't wait to participate in the second half of this digital music battle.
In March 2021, Kuaishou announced the billing standard based on song usage, opened the settlement channel for independent musicians, and proposed the music copyright settlement standard and song copyright settlement standard in the live broadcast scene, which means that Kuaishou has a high degree of attention to the music ecology of the platform, and strives to attract more musicians to the platform.
On the other hand, ByteDance's move into the music market is more resolute. At the end of July 2021, its internal test music agency distribution platform "Galaxy Ark" opened the entrance to labels and musicians; after that, Douyin also began to promote a one-stop service platform for internal test music promotion, and officially launched the "Music Player" function, breaking the deadlock that Douyin can only listen to some fragments of songs.
From playing to distribution to publicity, the links of the music industry chain ByteDance have begun to layout, which can be fully understood as a comprehensive advance on the music market, in the short video has shown a strong influence on the popularity of market songs, ByteDance's move is likely to attract the favor of some independent musicians, which may also become the starting point for variables in the future digital music industry pattern.
Is the Chinese music scene really over?
The positive entry of short videos is undoubtedly related to its ability to create hot songs, such as "The Wind Blows", "Mohe Ballroom", "Star Sea", "Honey Snow Ice City Sweet Honey"... It is an indisputable fact that these songs that have been popular in 2021, no matter which digital music platform they were born on, have been popular all over the Internet because of short videos, but at the end of 2021, this fact has finally triggered market dissatisfaction.
After the Tencent Music Entertainment Festival issued the annual top ten hot songs based on data (almost all ten songs have been fired on the short video platform), the biggest voice in the market is wondering, why are these songs? Is our Chinese music scene finished?
At the moment when personalized recommendation technology is constantly improving, in various platforms, including short videos, most people will only hear their favorite music, such an advantage is that everyone can be satisfied, but when the perspective is expanded to the entire market, the result shows that the public's music preferences, and the current public's music preferences are not necessarily oriented to the quality of the work, more inclined to be pleasant, good singing, strong empathy, fun These points, which makes people who have certain requirements for music quality finally express dissatisfaction.
In fact, this time the dissatisfaction comes largely from the contrast, once Jay Chou, Lin Junjie and a number of Chinese singers' works have both heat and quality, which makes the entire market get the satisfaction of listening to music, and this time the hot song list results are not as good as ever, which triggered a discussion in the market.
It should be said that this time the discussion voice actually represents a hope of the market - hot songs can be both good and good quality, after this hope is expressed, in fact, the Chinese music scene will not be "finished".
In the case that some people are willing to speak out, the industry will find that the current music ecology may satisfy most users, but it is not the whole market, and there are still a group of people who are not satisfied with the popular saliva songs on the whole network, and there are a group of creators who are not willing to write content that just earns traffic, and their dissatisfaction and unwillingness have the opportunity to be discovered by the platform, and there is a possibility of making the Chinese music scene good.
After all, the focus of the development of the current digital music platform is to do a good job, in the case of clearly seeing that some users are not satisfied, the platform has a greater motivation to fight for this group, then it is bound to be adjusted in the support strategy, traffic strategy and other links that affect people's discovery of music, in order to incubate more works that can meet the needs of different markets, so that good songs can also become popular.
For example, at present, digital music platforms no longer only have traffic-based lists, such as the hard-ground iroriet night held by NetEase Cloud Music to invite more professional practitioners to award musicians and works from multiple dimensions, Tencent Music has also made a wave of joint music charts, inviting front-line lyricists, composers, producers, arrangers and well-known original musicians including authoritative figures as judges, trying to evaluate music works outside the data.
In other words, this may also form a differentiated service with the short videos that entered the music market in the early stage, aiming at short videos that make hot songs and digital music platforms that try to promote good songs, serving different user groups, and attracting creator groups with different purposes through reasonable incentives and commercial returns, so that the Chinese music scene will blossom in the era of personalization.
Of course, the process of achieving this may be a bit lengthy, but we should believe that good music works exist in any era, and after more people discover the charm of high-quality music works, the market's standards for music "good listening" will also change.
So in this way, the music market in 2021 is actually showing hope, the hope is that the market is beginning to give feedback, not satisfied with the current popular single music content, which also makes us look forward to the adjustment of the digital music industry in the next year and the future trend of the music market.
*Original article, reprinted with attribution indicated