Will the path chosen by Yinyuetai be better now?
Text | Garlic jelly horn
Recently, the official blog of Yinyuetai posted that it was returning, and there were both apologies and statements in the long picture of the blog, and then #Yinyuetai is really back# and other 5 related topics rushed to Weibo hot search.
As an earlier vertical fan economy platform for domestic entertainment, Yinyuetai used to be a gathering place for groupies, but the aggressiveness and irregularity in operating the fan economy put it in trouble, from casting "shady", rumored arrears of wages, to being sued by brokerage companies for "suspected fraud", word-of-mouth problems + operating pressure made this platform enter a state of suspension in 2019.
Nowadays, the high-profile propaganda of Yinyuetai has returned, can it still go to the height it once did?
1
Past life: Destiny starts, but "only goes" downhill
In the information of the return of Yinyuetai, Times Fengjun has 2 related topics hanging on the hot search list, which also drives the nostalgia of the market.
In 2014, the three boys of TFBOYS, who were not yet famous, beat Super Junior at the annual ceremony of the Yinyue V list, and won the Most Popular Singer Award in the mainland and the Popular Singer Award in Yinyue Live Broadcast, opening the road to the development of their popularity. This verified the idea of Times Fengjun as a cultivation idol, and also allowed Zhang Dou, the founder of Yinyuetai, to see the consumption strength of the fan group, in other words, it was TFBOYS who won the award at the ceremony held by Yinyuetai, so that both companies were on their own development track.
At the beginning of its establishment, the main business was to provide MV content for the market, which attracted a large number of Hahan groupies for Yinyue when the high-definition resources of K-pop idol MV were relatively lacking. After that, Yinyue TV followed the Korean list program and launched the "Yinyue V List", so that the enthusiasm of domestic fan groups to support has a target, which is also the basis for Yinyue Tai to develop in the direction of fan economy later.
After completing the $35 million Series B financing in 2015, on the basis of providing MV content services, Yinyuetai expanded a number of businesses with fan economy as the core, including shopping malls, live broadcasts, event operations, star making, etc. Its business model is to use MV content to attract traffic, use V lists and activities to stimulate fans to be active and precipitate, and then complete consumption conversion through the mall. In 2015, the monthly activity of Yinyuetai reached 40 million, and the total turnover was close to 100 million yuan.
From the current point of view, there is nothing wrong with this business model, but for Yinyuetai, which was eager to develop at that time, it was not small. On the one hand, with the promotion of legalization in the music field, Yinyuetai has to pay high MV copyright fees, and with the development of short videos, the willingness of music companies to produce MVs has plummeted, so that the amount of MV content of Yinyuetai has gradually decreased; On the other hand, the "learning cost" of making a mall is not low, and a supply chain system alone needs to be built from scratch.
It is understood that at that time, Yinyuetai had to pay about 20 million yuan in copyright fees every year, that is, MV was a pure expenditure business. At the same time, the core mall business of Yinyuetai has not been recognized by users, and fans have expressed their dissatisfaction with Yinyuetai mall in many interviews, including slow delivery, slow customer service feedback and other problems.
At the same time, in the 2017 annual ceremony, EXO, which has always been the leader in the vote, was overtaken by the newcomer girl group ATF 2 minutes before the voting deadline, EXO fans angrily accused Yinyue Tai of throwing a shady scene, and the credibility of the platform collapsed instantly, even if the official explanation of Yinyue TV was caused by the computer system, the fan group's enthusiasm for voting on the Yinyue V list still plummeted.
In the mall can not yet constitute the pillar of income, and the MV business is under the pressure of continuous expenditure, the only way out of funds finally forced Yinyuetai to go astray.
In 2019, Kunyin Entertainment publicly stated that Yinyuetai did not settle any fees to Kunyin after obtaining all the money for the sale of ONER's physical album "Allergy". Subsequently, it was revealed that Yinyue Tai diverted the 10.164 million yuan obtained from the album for other purposes, and did not settle the fee to the logistics company, resulting in fans not receiving the album. This news directly knocked Yinyuetai to the bottom.
These two big negative events are the reason for the apology in the return letter of Yinyuetai, and then Yinyuetai also sent two apology letters and texts through Weibo, hoping that his correct attitude can gain the understanding of fans, but judging from the comments, fans are not as good to talk as Yinyuetai expected.
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In this life: and the music video say hi hi
Is the B station music version feasible?
In the return letter released by Yinyuetai, there was not only an apology but also a potential talk about the future development direction. The letter mentions, "Now Internet music products are farther and farther away from Yuexin, but more and more irrelevant functions... Short videos should be used for music, not the other way around...". From this point of view, Yinyuetai seems to be making a relatively pure music APP.
Judging from the current products, Yinyuetai is indeed very "clean". The home page has three sections: homepage, discovery, and me, presenting the dynamics of users' favorite channels and followers on the home page, and there are various MV categories and "Yuedan" recommendations on the discovery page, and there are three columns of "like", "Yuedan" and "work" on my page, on the whole, it is a music APP with a simple and fashionable interactive interface based on MV content.
The comeback of Yinyuetai seems to be about to put down the fan economy?
Rationally speaking, the fan economy is indeed difficult to reach by Yinyuetai. First of all, after the special action of "Qinglang Rice Circle Chaos Rectification" was launched, it was no longer feasible to induce fans to list celebrities, which made it impossible for Yinyuetai to create a "V list" based on popularity as the criterion, and the list guided by user behavior data could not bring revenue to the product.
Secondly, although there is still no mall specializing in selling celebrity artists' peripherals, after the development of live streaming and mature live streaming companies, each idol agency company will not rely too much on a mall that aggregates fan groups, after all, Lehua Entertainment has also reached the point of asking the boss to sell peripheral "rescue" companies with live streaming goods. This also makes the possible mall road of Yinyuetai difficult to follow.
Finally, in essence, Yinyuetai does not have its own artist resources, which means that if it is a fan economy, it can only be a partner and agent forever, and its own investment in the road of being an artist, now it can only start beyond its means. Therefore, several directions of the traditional fan economy are basically difficult to achieve by Yinyuetai.
So, will the path chosen by Yinyuetai be better now?
Combined with the return letter and products, what Yinyuetai is doing is a music video platform with certain content watchability, providing users with a platform for discovering music, listening to music, and having certain social attributes, while users can upload content. According to this positioning, we also see the new look of Yinyuetai - a PUGC music video community. And such a positioning, the competitors it will face are clearly visible.
First of all, at the level of providing music listening services, the competition of digital music platforms such as QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music is fierce enough. As the digital music market enters the stock era, various platforms have not yet found an absolute breakthrough point for development, either to try around social networking or to take music entertainment as the core, and membership income is still far from supporting the operation of the platform.
At the same time, each digital audio platform is doing the video of the content, which overlaps with the main characteristics of the video platform, if there is any difference between the video content and the MV, relatively more ornamental, and the interactive interface is more concise and clean.
However, a clean interface cannot be the core attraction of attracting users to watch MVs on it, content is. That is, in the short term, MV copyright will still be the highlight of Yinyuetai's capital expenditure.
Let's look at the user-uploaded video side, from the platform's creation convention, the types of user-available contributions are divided into two types: self-made and reprinted, and the possible copyright problems of reprinting and transportation are not mentioned for the time being, only open to the point of user self-made, it is easy to associate us with station B, moreover, under the understanding of Reading Entertainment Jun, the future development direction of Yinyuetai seems to be aimed at the music version of station B, or the PUGC music video community.
The reason why we have this conclusion is that Yinyue has set a revenue share for uploading videos, and although we can't see how the share is set exactly, this incentive mechanism is undoubtedly to increase the amount of UGC content on Yinyue Channel.
Therefore, from this point of view, the development route of Yinyuetai is supported by MV+ high-quality UGC content in the early stage, and if the community is formed in the later stage, it may be commercialized and expanded to the field of pan-music.
Walking along the old road of station B again, the idea is beautiful, but the reality is that the current market environment and the competition relationship to be faced are far different from the development of station B, not to mention that station B has not completed the verification of its own business model.
At best, music users are currently scattered on different platforms, which is an opportunity, but to gather these users into one platform, Yinyuetai must have something outstanding, or really solve the user's rigid needs, or find another way to impress users with absolute innovation. At present, the market's rigid demand for music entertainment is not clear, and there is not much novelty in Yinyuetai's products.
At worst, Station B has paid more and more attention to the development of the music field on its platform in the past two years, from doing self-made music variety shows, to signing musicians, and then to motivating music UP, under such a premise, how many users can Yinyuetai snatch out from the mouths of many giants? The answer is unknown.