Latecomers are rushing to grab users' attention.
Author | Wei Yuqi
Edit | Yan Fei
Source | Packed Lunch Finance (ID:daxiongfan)
On April 27, NetEase Cloud Music posted through the official WeChat public account, accusing Tencent Music of suspected unfair competition and claiming that it had initiated a lawsuit. Chen Mo, head of public relations for Tencent Music's brand, then responded that he "will not join the ranks of the fight", and that "the relevant evidence has been retained, and the lawsuit initiated has long been launched, believing in the fairness of the law".
The two major music platforms have long been fiercely competitive, and this dispute is not the first time that the dispute has been brought to court. The "mutual tearing" of the two is that you come and go, and the focus of the controversy is the infringement of music copyright and the plagiarism of APP products.
But the bigger problem is that just when the two giants continue to tear each other apart around the old set of things, pan-content platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, B Station, and Xiaohongshu have cut into the music track and challenged the giants.
Byte upgraded music to P1 priority business last year, and launched the independent music APP "Soda Music" in March this year; Kuaishou launched "Komori Singing" in May last year, which is said to be a music social; B station and Xiaohongshu did not do independent APP, but also strengthened the music layout within the community, such as B station vigorously developing music areas, Xiaohongshu is cultivating music bloggers, and in April this year engaged in a "music medicine" online music festival.
With the increase of song listening scenes, user habits are also changing.
According to Interface News, the financial report shows that the MAU (monthly active users) of Tencent Music's online music business in 2021 fell by 1.1% compared with the previous year; NetEase Cloud Music is still growing, but the growth rate has slowed down, with the user increase in the past three years being 4.21 million, 3.3 million and 2.1 million, respectively.
Many users are also aware of this change. Last December, after the Tencent Music Entertainment Festival released the top ten hit songs of 2021, most of them were closely related to short video platforms. This also indicates that the competition in the domestic online music industry has evolved from the traditional copyright and product disputes to the platform stickiness competition.
Even if there is more copyright and the product is better, if it is difficult to build a song listening scene, it is still difficult to retain users. When the user's listening habits in music consumption began to undergo structural changes, the result of Tencent and NetEase 'tearing each other apart' was no longer important.
After more than ten years of evolution, the domestic online music industry is only left with two major players, Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music, and the market has also changed from incremental to stock.
Third-party data support this trend. According to the "2022 Annual Comprehensive Analysis of China's Online Music Market" previously released by Analysys Qianfan, in January 2022, the average daily use time of domestic mobile music users was 21 minutes, down 21% year-on-year.
That doesn't mean people don't like to listen to songs anymore. Music is a low-threshold virtual consumer product, which generally maintains a relatively stable market demand. The reason for the significant reduction in the length of time spent by users is more likely to be the transfer of users to other platforms.
But judging from the moves of the two major platforms, they are still busy with the reserve of copyrights and fighting each other.
Not long before NetEase Cloud Music sued Tencent Music this time, NetEase Cloud Music also reached a strategic cooperation with Taiwan's Fumao Records, and the two sides will carry out in-depth cooperation in the fields of music copyright and artist promotion.
Almost at the same time that NetEase Cloud Music and Fumao Records reached a cooperation, Tencent Music, which also owns the copyright of Fumao Records' works, packaged the works of Fumao Records into a special area in QQ Music and formulated them into the home page. At present, users can still enter the zone by directly searching for Fumao Records.
NetEase Cloud Music's open letter against Tencent Music also contains copyright content. In addition, it also accused Tencent Music of copying its own Functions of Pushing Songs, Listening Together, and Playing Vinyl.
Whether it's a battle for content or a product innovation, both platforms are keeping up with user needs. However, the copyright library that Tencent Music has spent a lot of money to build, and the community that NetEase Cloud Music has spent a lot of energy to build, has not been able to retain users.
The business similarity between the two is very high, and there are two indicators that can reflect the growth status of users: MAU and the number of paid users, which are not optimistic in both aspects.
On the one hand, both MAUs are stuck in a slow-growing situation. Among them, Tencent Music's MAU last year was 615 million, down 1.1% year-on-year, and has been declining for seven consecutive quarters. Although the situation of NetEase Cloud Music is slightly better, its growth rate is only 1.2%, and the scale is about 183 million.
In terms of paying users, both user size and payment rate are growing, but this is the result of price for volume.
Taking Tencent Music as an example, the number of paid users in Q4 2021 increased by 36.1% year-on-year, and the payment rate increased by 3.4 percentage points year-on-year. Online music subscription revenue for the same period was 2.88 billion yuan, an increase of only 4.3%. ARPPU (average earnings per paying subscriber) fell to $8.5 from $9.4 in 2020.
The core of the survival and development of Tencent Music and Aiyouteng is content copyright. Only if the platform has enough and hot enough content can it attract users to consume, and then plant the mentality of "music = Tencent Music / NetEase Cloud Music" in the user's mind.
However, once the user's attention is divided by other platforms, the copyright moat that Tencent Music has spent a lot of money to build will be weakened.
This has already happened, and the most noticeable thing is the short video platform including Douyin.
At present, ByteDance has been deeply involved in the operation of the music industry, which is a far greater threat to Tencent music than "more traffic".
At the source of music content, ByteDance's Douyin/TikTok has reached a global licensing cooperation with the world's three major record labels Sony, Warner and Universal.
Douyin has also entered the publicity link, which is similar to ByteDance's playing style in film and television content, which helps Douyin to intervene more deeply.
The listening software "Soda Music", which has recently begun internal testing, allows ByteDance's music landscape to have a closed loop covering all chains of the music industry.
However, the rising stars have not yet produced a real threat to Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music, but the cards in the hands of the giants have become less and less. The biggest stumbling block in the way of latecomers is the commercial operation of copyright and music content.
The initial positioning of Douyin is "music short video", from the situation of the soda music internal beta version, making up for the shortcomings of content copyright will be the key to its success or failure.
For example, users can listen to their own Douyin collection song list in soda music, but soda music only has songs that Jay Chou has cooperated with other singers, and the number is not much, and the number of personal singles is 0.
NetEase Cloud Music is also plagued by this. At present, NetEase Cloud Music lists more than 500 works of Jay Chou, but less than 50 can be played, and they are all chorus works of Jay Chou and other artists, the rest are in a gray state, and QQ Music can play almost all of them. Some users even ran to the Weibo comment area of NetEase Cloud Music to leave a message "Please buy some copyright quickly", the importance of copyright can be seen.
In terms of commercialization, although Douyin has also followed the example of its predecessors and launched a plan to support musicians, it still faces new problems.
First of all, Douyin must bring considerable benefits to musicians in order to promote the activity of the creative end. On traditional online music platforms, musicians can share through traditional methods such as albums, as well as song playback shares.
Although all kinds of creators in Douyin can be commercialized through various methods such as official, third-party or self-receiving orders, the only way to commercialize is advertising. Compared with digital and games, music content is more difficult to monetize through advertising.
A Douyin advertising channel provider told the alphabet list that at present, Douyin cannot do music delivery. The earnings of musicians will also be limited as a result.
Secondly, musicians will also encounter the problem of "singers are not popular" in Douyin, and if Douyin fails to introduce effective measures, it will hit the enthusiasm of creators.
After "Paper Short Love Long" became popular on Douyin, the attention of its author, Yan Zhi'er Band, did not get an improvement that matched the work. At present, the number of Douyin fans of the yanzhier band is only 34,000, and the band even laughs at itself as a "domestic negative first-line band" in the introduction.
In addition to Douyin, other content platforms with a slightly smaller volume are also speeding up the layout of the music track and improving their own content matrix.
The layout of Kuaishou in this section is still based on copyright and creation. By the end of last year, it had partnered with hundreds of music rights companies; the number of musicians earning revenue had increased 7.5 times; and nearly 50 percent of the use of songs on the platform was contributed by non-blockbuster songs.
In addition, Kuaishou also launched "Komori Singing" in May last year, which is said to rely on AI (artificial intelligence) technology to create exclusive songs for users, thereby building a music community. But as of now, Kuaishou has not disclosed the latest operation of this APP.
The content of the music area of Station B is mainly based on secondary creations including cover songs and mixed cuts, which inevitably involve copyright issues. The approach of Station B is similar to that of its predecessors, and Tencent Music and Sony Music are both partners of Station B.
Take "Lone Brave" as an example, the theme song of the first animated derivative work of "League of Legends" was welcomed by IP fans after its release. The first in the number of plays in the B station is the Eason Chan version, followed by the cover version of the music district up master "ZuYana Xie" and "Xiu Xiu Man".
Little Red Book will increase the operation of music vertical categories from 2020. According to China Music Finance, Xiaohongshu's strategy is to first invite a group of rappers to settle in, including Liu Cong, Little Devil Wang Linkai, Ma Siwei, Liang Weijia, Li Daben and so on.
The content posted by these singers has achieved good results. Subsequently, Xiaohongshu expanded its categories to various subdivisions such as electronic music, bands, classical, vinyl, and atmospheric music, and held music activities such as "great classical music", "healing music that enters the soul in a second", "young bands", "musical instrument players", etc., in order to attract more musicians, labels, performance organizers, etc.
Musicians are also gradually migrating to other platforms. In mid-April this year, Little Red Book held the "Music Medicine" online music festival, inviting more than 20 musicians to perform. Almost at the same time, the famous rock singer Cui Jian held a concert on the video number, with a cumulative number of viewers as high as 46 million, becoming a popular entertainment event on the Internet.
When the new platform provides users with music content that is close to the tonality of the platform, it will leave users with the impression of "platform-music", which in turn will attract users to spend more time consuming music content on the platform.
This also shows that the market orientation of music consumption is transitioning from a platform-dominated seller's market to a consumer-led buyer's market. The wholesale and retail model of platform procurement of music copyrights and packaging sold to users is migrating to the C2M model of generating demand from users and purchasing copyrights on the platform.
In this process, byte, kuaishou, B station, Xiaohongshu platform has natural advantages. Compared with NetEase Cloud Music and Tencent Music, their content supply is more abundant, and they can explore more subdivided music needs from them and meet them through copyright procurement and "Divine Comedy" creation. The "Douyin Divine Comedy" has repeatedly dominated the Tencent Music Festival, which is the embodiment of this change.
NetEase Cloud Music and Tencent Music fight back and forth, still fighting for who has more copyrights and who has better functions. This is important, but it is actually meeting the needs of core music lovers, and the theoretical scale of this group of people is only equivalent to 1/10 of all Netizens. From this point of view, the battle between the two platforms will not only fail to decide the winner or loser, but will become an obstacle restricting them from breaking through the ceiling.
But this is not to say that emerging content platforms such as Douyin can replace NetEase Cloud Music and Tencent Music in the music field. Although they have traffic and users, they are at a disadvantage in terms of copyright, and the user's payment habits are far from formed. People often see music as an additional feature of the platform, rather than the first scene of listening to songs, and the willingness to spend money is not strong.
This user psychology, which has been stereotyped, is the "firewall" of NetEase Cloud Music and Tencent Music in the face of new opponents. How to open up the brain and attract more non-core singers is the development focus they should pay attention to, and it is also one of the solutions to avoid their own pipeline. As for each other's copyright and product competition, it does not matter in the long run.