Hello everyone, I am Shen Lihui of the modern sky.
Many people know Modern Sky because of the variety shows of the two years of fire.
Last year, some of the hottest bands in "Summer of bands" — New Pants, Pain, Mr. Turtle — were all signed bands for Modern Sky. This year, the right to reinvent the statue, the Gojo people, and the Dada band are also there. Many people ask me if there is a dark curtain on this matter, and I can't explain it at all.
In fact, as early as seven years ago, Modern Sky was associated with variety shows.
In 2013, Song Dongye's "Miss Dong" was covered in "Happy Male Voice", opening a chapter in the era of folk fires; after that, Ma Wei's "Nanshan South" and Ah Yan's "I Eat Fried Chicken in People's Square" were successively on fire. Suddenly, Modern Sky went from a niche music company to a huge music label.
Countless people have asked me, after folk songs, where is the next musical trend? My answer is hip-hop. In order to create our own hip-hop label, we signed a series of hip-hop artists, including Wannida, Chen Guanxi, Manshuk, TT, Red Flower Club and so on. As it turns out, these artists have toured greatly and have performed well at the box office. Last year's "Summer of the Band" actually amplified the music culture of the band that modern sky accumulated the deepest through variety shows, and now, the choice of original musicians has gradually become the mainstream of Chinese music variety shows, among which the role of modern sky is very important. It's not that variety shows have changed us, but we've changed variety shows.
This year, we made a major decision to change the previous model of sending people to different variety shows, devote ourselves to variety production, and turn the Strawberry Music Festival into a variety show format. Of course, challenges and opportunities coexist.
The instructor | Shen Lihui, founder and CEO of Modern Sky, a student of Chaos Academy Phase I
Editor| Chaos University Business Research Team
Support | Sun Yuchen, Director of the Frontier Course at Chaos University
This article is a course note for chaos university frontier courses
Ups and downs Grow against the trend
Back to the beginning, modern sky was founded in 1997, and it has been growing against the trend in the music industry for more than two decades, and it is really not easy to become what it is today.
A lot of people think it's definitely not profitable to play rock'n' roll, and yes, we've had a lot of low times. One word, it's miserable. Peng Lei, the lead singer of New Pants, said, "When the second album was released, Modern Sky's company was in a very bad condition and was almost unable to pay its salary", which is one of the few truths that Peng Lei has said (laughs).
Why is it so miserable? At that time, the medium of dissemination of popular music was undergoing drastic changes.
Modern Sky was founded in 1997 or the cassette era, we have good sales and revenue, but after a year or two, the CD era came, due to the ease of copying, the share of pirated CDs quickly exceeded the genuine. In two years, the Internet era came, music became free, and even pirates could not survive.
At that time, how far did we not have money? One day an employee said to me, "I haven't paid for 18 months." It is hard to imagine how many people in this day and age have the patience to continue to do it for 18 months without pay.
By providing music services to large enterprises such as Motorola and Nokia, we have come out of the predicament, but service is not our original intention. In 2006, we made up our minds to complete our own creations and let the brand follow us, not us.
Creating the Modern Sky Music Festival was a thrilling leap for us. At that time, there were only more than 1 million on the account, and it cost 3 million to invest in a music festival. The day after the idea was announced, the publicity director resigned, he felt that for a team of seven or eight people, the music festival was an unimaginable task, even if it was done, there was no benefit for the time being, and if it failed, it might return to the starting point and even bear debt.
However, although we were not in a good financial position at the time, the young people were very recognized. At the first festival, our slogan was Music+, music originated from Modern Sky as a music company, a label, and + was a mixture of lifestyle and immersive experience. At the time, our ambition was to create a music festival that showcased the aesthetics of modern skies.
However, when the music festival really landed, it was found that it was all pits.
The day before the festival started, the last time I went to the scene, the hottest band in the United States at the time, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, had stayed in the hotel, and I sat in the taxi to Haidian Park, watching the sunset and shedding tears, thinking it was too handsome.
I didn't think about the next day, it was a mess. In the morning, the media cards and cooperative certificates we put in the tents were snatched away by scalpers. When I went to the music festival, there were fake tickets and fake certificates everywhere.
On the surface, the stage is in order, the artists are methodical, and all the audiences are very enthusiastic, as if a mature music festival should be. But the underlying logic of the festival, from ticketing anti-counterfeiting, document management to security, I have no concept at all. Instead, I put more than half of my energy into the festival experience, such as how the steel rainbow door is more beautiful, and what kind of light box with graffiti works better at night.
After the first year of the festival, all the money in our accounts was cleared.
But in the process, we gained tremendous user recognition.
On the third day, it rained heavily, but thousands of spectators at the festival were waiting for the last band to play, and the yeah yeahs stage performance in the finale was very beautiful, and after the festival, many people said they were sick with a fever, but it was an experience they will never forget.
In fact, both for them and for us, they will never be forgotten.
Why does Modern Sky gain unanimous recognition from the audience? I think the rebellion against mainstream aesthetics is the most important reason.
Unlike the red rock represented by Cui Jian, Tang Dynasty, Black Panther, and Magic Rock Sanjie, modern sky represents blue modernity. In the era of information explosion, young people are looking forward to more open and diverse music styles, and Modern Sky can express the ideas and aesthetics of the most cutting-edge young people. The emergence of the Modern Sky Music Festival is not only a huge innovation in the business model, but also a huge innovation in concept and aesthetics.
It is also amazing to say that the Modern Sky Music Festival, at the beginning, was an idea in the mind, but then countless surreal stories occurred and became the memories that cherished the minds of countless people.
Next, there's the Strawberry Music Festival.
Starting from Tongzhou Canal Park, today's strawberries have gone to 20 cities across the country, even if the epidemic is raging this year, strawberries still return on time, it is like a party of young people in the corner of the universe that never ends.
The Strawberry Music Festival has a theme every year, and each time it is a process of re-creation.
To cite two examples, the theme of the 2014 Strawberry Music Festival is "Social Network Life is Rubbish, Welcome to the Real World!" From British rock band Blur's album Modern life is rubbish. Because many of our customers are social networking companies, we are protesting with our slogans and asking if we can't be so direct. In fact, we are ironic, because we feel that we can no longer be separated from the Network, from the virtual world.
The theme of 2017 is "Lonely Ranger", and the current young people have a deep understanding of the word "lonely", although there are tens of thousands of spectators on the scene, but everyone is a lonely and very different individual, with their own independent universe. We also embedded a scene in the music festival, a group of musicians online to select a user, offline a small room for this person to open a concert, called the lonely concert.
In addition to the theme and style, the Strawberry Music Festival is also very successful commercially. Taking the 2020 Chongqing Strawberry Music Festival as an example, 40% of the audience comes from other cities, which has a significant "spillover effect" on the urban economy and can greatly stimulate local consumption.
Fractals create new species
There are now about 300 music festivals in China every year, and the competition is very fierce, why do strawberries have such strong vitality and competitiveness?
Its core lies in Modern Sky, which began as a record company, music company, artist agency, from the early days to sign the sobriety, supermarket, new pants these bands, investment in these artists, it has precipitated a large number of music copyrights. So far, we've worked with more than 300 artists and have a library of thousands of songs.
Of course, copyright did not make any money at all in previous years, but in recent years, the policy has become stricter than the piracy crackdown on Internet broadcasting platforms, and the value of copyright has slowly been revealed. In addition, Modern Sky has thousands of small performances, hundreds of concerts, dozens of music festivals every year, and live music is also an important business segment.
For Modern Sky, it can be said that the signed artists have driven the copyright business and driven the live music, and it can also be said that the music festival has driven the artist management and the music copyright, and the three have formed a cycle. In other words, if we have to talk about competition, Strawberry is not competing with other music festivals in the context of music festivals, but standing upstream and discussing competition from the perspective of what music companies want to do.
In addition to the core segments, we have also started a number of other businesses (plus). For example, on the Internet, Modern Sky has developed its own user platform "on the spot", 55% of the tickets are sold through its own channels, and it also has its own paid members; the media sector has opened up many local podcasts in Guangxi and Hunan; at the same time, as a music company based on vision, our vision can provide very high quality assurance for artist packaging. And consistent aesthetics are the premise of the two circulatory systems.
Of course, at the end of the day, the musician is the most important starting point for the modern sky, and in the dark words of chaos, the musician is one. All of our performances are driven by musicians, and the vitality of strawberry music festivals is also because we have achieved different stages of achievements and created different stages of trends at different stages.
I've made that clearer this year.
The epidemic has caused all offline performances to be suspended, and many platform parties have proposed prices that are difficult to refuse, asking our artists to do online concerts and let users watch for free, but I finally did not agree. In fact, the price paid by the platform exceeds the revenue of many live concerts, but as Modern Sky, we should respect the content and cultivate the payment habits of users.
Of course, for the platform, the user is one, they want to provide users with more choices, more benefits, but for modern sky, musicians are one, a well-prepared concert is destined not to be free. We are a company with musicians at its core, not a performer.
Speaking of musicians, Modern Sky has formed its own label matrix according to different aesthetic orientations.
Badhead, for example, after Beijing's new voice, we want to break ourselves and rebel against ourselves. Zuo Xiaozu, Hu Mo, Fly Band, Chen Dili these bands are very experimental, rebellious, subverting the traditional music cognition, they are obviously different from the early sobriety of Modern Sky, wheat field watchmen, new pants, flowers, supermarkets, we set up a new label BADHEAD Bad Brain.
M_DSK is also like this, on the eve of the popularity of hip-hop, we set up a M_DSK, which was responsible for a girl who had done business development before, from a small idea, and today it has become the largest label in the field of hip-hop in China. A year after the establishment of the M_DSK, we started the M_DSK hip-hop stage in Strawberry, followed by the M_DSK Music Festival, and the artists once again expanded the copyright and live music.
The new label White Cat Laundromat, the name is very nonsensical, has signed more than 20 groups of fresh faces in the year since its establishment. Some time ago, the director of the White Cat Laundromat told me to create a music festival for the White Cat Laundromat. This label matrix is actually fractal innovation, constantly self-replicating.
Looking at these plants in the picture above, they are masterpieces of nature, because there is logic, so it is very beautiful to look closely, hiding all the secrets of the universe. In fact, many of human creations are unconsciously paying homage to the laws of nature, and this is the case in the modern sky.
Why the "small unit" mechanism?
Because the cost of trial and error is not so high, using musicians as "small units" allows them to create from the heart, which is lower than the hundreds of millions of orders of magnitude in the film industry. At the same time, the musicians are scattered and need to have octopus-like tentacles in order to find them faster, so that the feedback mechanism is more maneuverable and flexible. In addition, the more fractals there are, the less likely they are to fall into simple self-repetition.
So what new species did fractals create?
For example, modern sky's parent-child label. In the past, these rock and roll youth, literary and artistic youth talked about topics such as "where to drink today", but suddenly one day, they had children, the topic changed, and the generation who listened to the Modern Sky Music Festival also began to have their own children. When the user scenario changes, the modern sky parent-child label Small Strawberry is born.
The core of Little Strawberry is actually the same as the Modern Sky Music Festival, which is music+, which is to let the musicians performing on stage have their own workshops offstage, and the exchanges in the workshops can include music creation, environmental education, parent-child interaction, etc., so the relationship between Little Strawberries and modern Sky Music Festival is in the same vein, which is the fractal innovation of the "small unit" of musicians.
This year's home strawberries are also a typical case. During the epidemic at home, Modern Sky launched a house strawberry on the B station, and you can see Ding Wu, the lead singer of the Tang Dynasty Band, a big man with long hair and a fierce look in the pancake, and some musicians playing games, tai chi, and so on. House Strawberry presents the side of musicians' lives off the stage, and this new perspective has been a great success, becoming a major source of income for Modern Sky in the first half of the year.
Modern sky worldview
Over the years, the modern sky has slowly grown into a tree, with the earth under its feet and lush foliage.
But I also always wonder, what is the meaning of the existence of modern skies? Rock, folk, hip hop, indie music, do we need such a modern sky?
Returning to a journey more than a decade ago, when the modern sky was at a low ebb, two or three of us fled Beijing to Tibet under the banner of recording records. In a place where there is no industry and no traces of modern life, it is not quiet, but many sounds can be heard, and even the wind can be heard through the leaves, and the very subtle sounds of animals can be heard.
One morning, we were awakened by the song and followed the song, and a group of people were working on the roof and singing, and we recorded these sounds as if they came from ancient times. Later, I always wondered, why is there no score, no recording, so that such a sound can be passed down from ancient generations to today? I think it's because they can find an energy connection to the universe.
In modern society, everyone is immersed in the world they have created, and may no longer hear the voices that are stronger connected to the source. So, Modern Sky hopes to connect these codes of life, to extract a little bit from modern life, and to stand with the laws of nature.
Modern Sky wants to do one thing, an ode to life. With the most authentic mentality to choose musicians, to create a voice that can affect many people, these voices in a sense like those songs in Tibet, have the same energy that resonates with the universe.
*This article is based on Mr. Shen Lihui's course at Chaos University, and the entire course duration is 2 hours. Limited by the reading experience of WeChat, the content of this article is only 1/10 of the complete course, if you want to know the complete dry goods of Shen Lihui's wonderful course content, please click the poster below and scan the code to watch the course.