Author | Fan Zhihui
23 years ago, Ding Lei publicly told the media for the first time on the day of NetEase's listing that his wish was to open a record company.
If you don't forget it, there will be an echo. In April 2013, NetEase Cloud Music was officially launched, and time flickered by, and this music product incubated by NetEase also ushered in its tenth anniversary.
In the past decade, online music has been on the rise. After a cruel copyright war, the music industry has bid farewell to barbaric growth, but it is also destined for someone to withdraw in the shuffle, Tian Tian Ting, Domi Music, Shrimp Music, etc. have become a thing of the past, and the only two giants such as Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music have also been successfully listed, forming the current "one super and one strong" pattern.
As a latecomer to online music, doubts and flowers about NetEase Cloud Music have never been absent. Through the time cycle, is it an accidental fluke in the chaotic world, or a real dark horse that grasps the wind of the times? What new stories can be told in the next decade of online music?
Is it a real dark horse, or is it a matter of luck?
The decade of NetEase Cloud Music is also the golden decade of China's Internet rapid progress.
In the early days of the birth of digital music, the Internet products represented by Baidu MP3 (2002) shaped the listening habits of users searching and downloading, and also planted the concept of "listening to songs for free" in the hearts of Chinese people. Nearly 20 years ago, mainstream music products such as Kugou Music (2004), QQ Music (2005), Kuwo Music (2006), and Shrimp Music (2007) have appeared successively, jointly supporting the PC era of Internet music.
But new market opportunities are also brewing. According to Baidu's "Mobile Internet Development Trend Report", in the fourth quarter of 2012, the time spent on mobile Internet online exceeded that of PC Internet for the first time. The 31st Statistical Report on Internet Development in China released by CNNIC also shows that by the end of December 2012, the number of mainland Internet users reached 564 million, of which the scale of mobile Internet users expanded rapidly, reaching 420 million, surpassing desktop computers to become the first Internet terminal.
In other words, in 2013, China officially entered the mobile era from the PC Internet era. On April 23 of the same year, NetEase Cloud Music was officially launched, which seized the opportunity of this era transformation and caught the music products based on the PC side by surprise.
But the "timing" alone is not enough, and NetEase Cloud Music has also caught up with the "favorable people". As mentioned earlier, China was still a copyright barbaric land at that time, the copyright fee was not high, and the entry threshold was low, which was geographically advantageous; At that time, the form of music products was mainly players, with strong tool attributes, and the emotional needs and social needs of users in the process of listening to songs were not met.
To put it simply, the success of NetEase Cloud Music and even the subsequent rise is inseparable from the following key points: the rise of the mobile Internet, the legalization of online music, and the pain points of users in music apps.
Based on this, on the day of NetEase Cloud Music's launch in 2013, it announced that it would support Chinese original music, and launched the first original music support project that year. At the same time, from the beginning of its launch, NetEase Cloud Music has been positioned as a mobile music community, and has not followed the old path of music library products, not only creating a song list as the underlying architecture, but also deriving and iterating a series of social functions such as personalized recommendation, music review, dynamic, listening together, star review hall, music fan group, etc., shaping users' sense of identity and belonging to the platform.
NetEase Cloud Music's unique music review culture is connected to the daily life of cloud village users, and Cloud Village Music Review Subway, graduation season music review street lights, etc., are all brand events that have been praised over the years.
It is the differentiated route of music social networking that has also created the "NetEase Cloud Music Speed" of user growth: from April 2013 to November 2017, the number of NetEase Cloud Music users has achieved an explosion from 0 to 400 million, and its cycle of breaking 100 million is 27 months, 12 months, 9 months, and 7 months, successfully entering the first camp of domestic online music.
Today, starting with song lists and music social networking, after years of deep cultivation of community culture, NetEase Cloud Music has grown into the largest music community in China and even showing promising commercial value.
According to the latest financial report of NetEase Cloud Music, in 2022, in a not optimistic environment, NetEase Cloud Music's annual revenue will be 9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.5% over 2021, achieving high growth against the trend; The gross margin for the full year also increased significantly to 14.4% from 2.0% in 2021, and the adjusted net loss narrowed by nearly 90%. At the same time, the number of monthly active users of online music services has steadily climbed to 189 million, an increase of 4% year-on-year, and the daily active users have increased their listening time to 78.9 minutes, and the community ecology has continued to expand.
Many people wonder why NetEase Cloud Music was not dragged down in the copyright war, and the answer is actually very simple. There may be users who leave because of copyright differences, but there are too many reasons for users to come back and stay in NetEase Cloud Music again.
The wind starts at the end of the green ping, and the waves form between the gentle waves. NetEase Cloud Music can break out of the siege from a group of music products and become a dark horse in the market, which is obviously not only a fluke, but also the team behind it with love and innovation, put into continuous innovation in product functions and user experience, and finally took a decisive road.
Ten years behind, two key words
So, what has NetEase Cloud Music brought to users and the music industry in the past decade?
With this question, I asked several friends around me who like music, and the answers they gave included but were not limited to: song lists, reviews, cloud villages, original music, listening reports, listening together, music marketing, it is not difficult to see that every keyword is related to users and musicians.
Among them, the two most critical achievements are original music and music community, which are also the two points that NetEase Cloud Music has the deepest impact on the online music industry.
In 2014, the first anniversary of NetEase Cloud Music's launch, it called on all walks of life to increase their attention to original music, and proposed that NetEase Cloud Music would invest heavily to support original music and independent musicians. In 2015, NetEase Cloud Music launched the "Ideal Musician" plan, and after a year of testing the waters, at the end of 2016, NetEase Cloud Music launched a more complete "Stone Plan", providing all-round support from seven aspects, such as promotion, original work recording support, performance, appreciation, and musician index, which has basically become a model for various domestic music support plans.
Just a few days ago, NetEase Cloud Music also released the "Cloud Ladder Plan 2023 Phase I", further increasing the income support for musicians, and creating a better creative survival environment through measures such as 100% of the proceeds of platform broadcasting belonging to musicians.
The criterion for testing the support results and platform capabilities is not the success of many head artists, but the survival situation of most of the tail people. After all, head artists can live well on any platform, and what really needs to be done is to give those potential musicians exposure and opportunities to achieve the success of most people.
Later, we all heard that "The Wind Rises", "Ideal Thirty", "Chengdu", "Clouds and Smoke", "The Beauty of the World is Intertwined with You", "Mohe Dance Hall", "Goodbye Monica", "If I Put You" and many other popular hits are all from NetEase Cloud Music, and have also witnessed how musicians such as Chen Hongyu, Good Sister, Landlord's Cat, Jude and other musicians have gone from unknown to the public stage.
NetEase Cloud Music's ambition does not stop there, and more importantly, "to do the industrialization of Chinese original music." ”
On the one hand, NetEase Cloud Music has done a solid job in the refinement of support, extending from the stone plan to more systematic support programs such as the "Cloud Ladder Project", the Star Collection Song Competition, the Hard Ground Fireside Night, and the Hard Court Original Music List. On the other hand, NetEase Cloud Music turned its attention to behind-the-scenes and infrastructure services, releasing the industry's first behind-the-scenes arranger list, behind-the-scenes recommendation list and behind-the-scenes research institute and other content promotion columns, and also launched its own one-stop Beat trading platform BeatSoul, music copyright authorization platform "Cloud Village Exchange", etc.
By the end of 2022, the number of original musicians of NetEase Cloud Music had exceeded 611,000, and a total of about 2.6 million music tracks had been created, making it a veritable original music town. Looking back, it is based on the deep cultivation in the field of original music that NetEase Cloud Music has broken the superstition of "copyright theory" and found a way in the red sea competition for copyright.
As the first share of the global music community, NetEase Cloud Music has single-handedly built a music community built by comments, song lists, dynamics and other functions, forming a language system of "cloud village", "villager" and "village chief". Behind this, it contains the values of the community itself, and also precipitates the relationship chain of users, which greatly deepens the bond and connection between users, content and platforms.
There is such a true story: the NetEase Cloud Music user with the ID "Seongnam Flower Has Blossomed" is a teenager with advanced bone cancer, who gave his favorite musician "Three Mu Land" a private message, hoping that Three Mu Land would write a song with his Cloud Music ID, and finally the song was completed and the teenager also heard it. Although he did not escape the disease in the end, the boy's strength in the face of cancer and the friendship between the villagers also touched the hearts of countless people in Yuncun, and there are still netizens who go to the comment area of the song to remember the teenager.
Generally speaking, once a community culture is formed, it is often very stable and difficult to be copied and replaced, and the high stickiness and strong link between users and the platform can greatly improve user stickiness and activity. Under the unique music community ecology, high-quality content, users, creators, copyright owners, and musicians have also formed a benign growth "flywheel effect", and promoted more user duration, richer UGC content and higher willingness to pay.
According to the latest financial report, in 2022, the number of monthly paid users of NetEase Cloud Music's online music service reached 38.27 million, a year-on-year increase of 32.2%; The payment rate further increased from 15.8% in 2021 to 20.2%; At the same time, the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users has remained stable at more than 30%, and the stickiness of community users has also remained high.
To some extent, NetEase Cloud Music's advantages in community ecology further enhance the platform's content distribution efficiency in addition to algorithm recommendations, self-made content, graphics, audio and video, etc. This has also been verified in the earnings report, as of the end of 2022, 33.4% of music playback came from platform recommendations, much higher than Spotify's 10%-20%.
In the next decade,
What's new?
The past decade has also been a decade of steady recovery of China's music industry.
According to IFPI data, in 2013, China ranked 21st in the global recorded music market, and in 2022, it rose to 5th, with a growth rate of 28.4%, confirming the booming Chinese music market.
In the middle of last year, Goldman Sachs also raised its growth forecast for the music industry in the newly released "Music in the Air" report, and believes that by 2030, streaming media will continue to be the main driver of music market growth as the scale of music streaming revenue, subscription prices and the number of platforms grow.
The same is true for domestically. With the improvement of domestic payment levels and the diversification of online music profit models, China's music industry will also usher in large-scale growth.
The so-called big water raises big fish, under the continuous improvement of the basic plate, the growth space of domestic music platforms is also very large. From the perspective of the general trend, this space is not only the content production itself represented by original music, but also the commercial value behind AIGC music, long audio, music social, short video and other fields.
All in all, the development of the music industry, in the final analysis, lies in ecological development and upstream and downstream industrialization, which is a new opportunity in the next decade, and more new stories will naturally emerge.
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