After 5 years of silence, the personalized music recommendation platform "Luo", which was once regarded as the "utopia of independent music", recently announced its relaunch and changed its name to "Sparrow Music".
It is understood that the new official website and App have been launched. According to the relevant information published on the official website, Bird Music was founded by a group of people who like and love independent music, and is committed to spreading independent music from all over the world. And these seem to be no different from the previous arrests.
As for the reason for the name change, it may mean saying goodbye to the failed past, but according to the official, the more realistic factor is that the name can no longer be registered. So the question is, after a lapse of five years, is there still the strength to fight again? To answer this question, it may be necessary to start with how the arrest ended up in the "utopia of independent music" in the first place.
It is understood that the arrest of the founder, which was founded in 2003, was only the personal music blog of the founder Hu Jianguo at first. And in the first ten years after it was launched, it was always maintained by Hu Jianguo with volunteers in his spare time. In addition to recommending independent music works at home and abroad, the company also provides content including interviews with musicians, music knowledge, music industry-related interactions, and poetry.
It was not until 2013 that the company officially set up a team in Guangzhou and established multiple platforms such as websites and mobile applications. While the carrier is changing, what remains unchanged is that the arrest has always maintained an independent literary and artistic tone, and continues to output high-quality content, and the users and traffic have also amazed the outside world for a time, and even became a symbol that can prove that a person has a musical taste at that time. According to official data, as of December 2017, the number of users who have been arrested has exceeded 6.7 million.
Of course, the establishment and development of the arrested are also inseparable from the opportunities brought by the times. On the one hand, at that time, the domestic Internet industry began to enter a stage of rapid development, and the new era opened by Baidu, Sohu, NetEase, etc., cultivated the soil for the emergence of websites. As the Internet continues to break down information barriers, the information that users can access is no longer limited to traditional channels, and the prototype of self-media with strong personal colors has begun to emerge.
On the other hand, the domestic online music market has also ushered in a period of rapid development. According to the 21st Survey on the Development of the Internet in China released in 2008, 86.6% of Internet users listened to online music at that time, and the download rate was as high as 71.2%.
But the so-called founder's temperament determines the company and products, even if it really becomes a commercial company, and the number of users is considerable, but due to Hu Jianguo's belief in the concept of "free", and out of concern about protecting the integrity and purity of the "utopia of independent music", the arrest has always kept a distance from commercialization, almost relying on the contribution and assistance of shareholders and users, and even the servers were once purchased or donated by users.
Morita, an editor who once worked in the arrest, once said, "Until the moment of the arrest, all the singles, albums, texts and other recommendations you saw about musicians in the arrest never received a penny." The most common gifts I have received are a few tickets to the show."
The last straw that crushed the arrest was its involvement in the offline physical space. Since 2016, with the enthusiastic support of users, Hu Jianguo has successively crowdfunded more than 1 million yuan in Guangzhou and Beijing to create an offline music space. According to him, if five stores are opened across the country, coupled with various online businesses, the valuation of the net will exceed 100 million yuan.
However, due to problems such as wrong site selection and improper operation methods, only a year and a half later, Hu Jianguo's vision was shattered. At the beginning of December 2017, Hu Jianguo announced that the app would stop maintenance, two offline music spaces would be closed, and he also collapsed because of suspected financial fraud and blame-shifting. In this entrepreneurial story of "starting from feelings and finally farce", there seems to be no winner.
From today's point of view, in the absence of both a professional management and operation team and a sustainable core profit model, decline is almost an inevitable outcome. And if Quele, who inherited the will of the arrested, wants to continue, it is obvious that at least these problems need to be solved first.
What can be seen now is that Hu Jianguo can no longer be seen in the various restart statements of Quele and the related information of the operating entity. But the question is, even if it can get rid of the gene of refusing commercialization, in today's era when traffic is king, big and complete, in the face of the online music market that has almost been carved up, coupled with the competitors who are mostly backed by Internet giants, does the solo Finch really have a chance to try commercialization and gain the favor of the capital market?
In a statement released in August 2023, the team clearly pointed out that "since we have no development expenses at present, all the people involved in the development (of the app) are generating electricity for love". It can be seen that at least at this stage, Quele can still only follow the old path of being caught. Not to mention, Finch has the same original sin as many established music websites, that is, copyright issues. In the current situation that the business model is not yet clear, what does Quele rely on to buy copyrights?
Of course, the capture may still be the feelings of many users, but after the user shouts Ye Qing's return, what kind of new story can Quele tell. You don't see, whether it is Tianya or Yinyuetai, which is also a music community, at least so far, it has not been able to achieve a breakthrough because of the word feelings.
At the end of the day, as a user, everyone may want to have more choices, but in the Internet industry, where changes and new concepts and new ways to play are constantly emerging, users' attention and budgets are always limited. In such a situation, it may be even more difficult for the comeback to complete the unfulfilled wish of being caught.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]