Author | Echo edits | Fan Zhihui
In the music industry, classical music has always been considered a field of high and low. In today's curiosity-ridden Internet ecology, classical music that sits above the temple is becoming more and more marginal, shining in the minds of a small number of music fans.
In 2018, Yu He, the founder of Cook Music, said bluntly in an interview: "Most people don't know Cook. "Even last month, Cook Music released the information of the IPO in the United States, few people know what Cook is doing.
In those years when capital poured into the entertainment industry, Cook Music was "gilded" all the way. In 2014, it received a series A financing of 10 million yuan from Wheatton Investment, a series B financing of 10 million yuan from StarStar Capital in 2015, and a listing on the New Third Board in 2016.
After that, Cook Music began to start the "listing dream". In November 2017, Cook Music was delisted from the New Third Board and chose the Hong Kong market, which is closer to international capital. However, from June 2018 to January 2019, Cook Music failed to hit the Hong Kong Stock Exchange twice, which set its sights on the US stock market.
<h1>This time, can Cook Music's "listing dream" come true? </h1>
In 2007, when pirated music was all over the world, Yu He decided to become an Internet music company related to classical music, which at the time "really set all the conditions of 'death': classical music, online listening, paid, and it was still genuine." Recalling the ten years that Cook Music has experienced, Yu He once joked to himself.
It is also true that other small companies that run classical music on the Internet have basically disappeared in the past decade.
After surviving more than a decade of market ups and downs, even if it is unknown, Cook Music can finally prove that classical music, a seemingly "outdated" business, can also play well on the Internet.
According to public information, Cook Music uses the Internet digital music library as a service platform to engage in non-pop music copyright operation and distribution business for universities, libraries, commercial customers, mobile Internet and other fields. Among them, music licensing and subscription services, smart music education, and classical music live are the main businesses, accounting for 44.9%, 31.0% and 24.1% of their revenue in 2019, respectively.
Combined with Frost & Sullivan's report, the company became the largest provider of classical music copyright licensing services in China (46.6% market share) and the second largest online classical music subscription service provider (13.8% market share) in 2019. At the same time, the company is also a leading provider of smart music education services in China, ranking first in the total revenue of smart pianos in 2019, and second in terms of smart pianos, smart piano education services, and the number of music students using the company's smart pianos.
In addition, from the introduction of classical music copyrights such as Naxos, countdown and ARC to the introduction of high-definition scenes of the Vienna State Opera, Cook Music has also built the largest and high-quality classical music copyright platform in China. As of December 31, 2019, Cook Music has a repertoire of about 1.8 million music tracks (1.6 million traditional classical, 220,000 jazz, world, folk and other genres), and the vast majority of content products are exclusively licensed.
However, it is worth noting that although Cook Music has a high market share in classical music circles, the company's performance in recent years has not been so satisfactory.
According to the prospectus, in 2018 and 2019, the operating income of Cook Music was 152 million yuan and 146 million yuan, and the net profit was 40.46 million yuan and 56.76 million yuan, respectively. In the first three quarters of 2020, Cook Music's revenue was 34.9 million yuan and net loss was 59.93 million yuan, an increase of 83.6 times compared with 700,000 yuan in the same period of 2019. In this regard, Cook Music said that the main reason for the loss in 2020 is the rise in operating costs and the impact of the epidemic.
It can be seen that in the past one or two years, the revenue of Cook Music has declined to a certain extent, and the net profit that has been turning from profit to loss since September 2019 has encountered the worse blow of the epidemic, resulting in its losses expanding sharply in 2020.
However, the fundamental dilemma of Cook Music is that although the market share is high, it still cannot withstand the fact that the circle of classical music itself is very unpopular, and its market capacity is still small. For Cook Music, which is eager to realize its listing dream, if it wants to fly higher, it is necessary to expand its profitability and develop new business.
Laying out live classical music events is an important step for Cook Music in 2020. In February last year, Cook Music acquired a 100% stake in BMF (Beijing International Music Festival Culture Communication Co., Ltd.) through an equity swap transaction, becoming one of the few companies in China with the experience and scale of holding large-scale live classical music events. It is reported that the Beijing International Music Festival held by BMF has a history of 22 years.
In addition, Cook Music has another way to increase revenue, that is, the smart music education solution business. Since November 2015, Cook Music has been providing smart music education solutions, mainly including the integration of Kukey smart pianos and self-developed intelligent teaching systems, specially designed for one-to-many teaching in a synchronous interactive learning environment, providing services for educational institutions at all levels such as kindergartens to universities and colleges in China.
According to the prospectus, from July 1, 2019 to September 30, 2020, the company's cooperative kindergartens increased from 43 to 1300, the number of Kuke smart pianos placed in kindergartens increased from about 350 to about 6800, and the number of Kukey students quickly increased to more than 10200, an amazing growth rate.
According to the "2020 China Music Industry Report", the scale of the music education and training industry in 2019 was 92 billion yuan, an increase of 7.9% year-on-year. Among them, the number of music examination applicants is about 1.69 million, and the scale of the examination industry is 84.85 billion yuan; the number of applicants for the music art examination is about 143,000, and the scale of the training industry is about 7.15 billion yuan. This is undoubtedly good news for Cook Music.
The success of Cook Music lies in the fact that it staggers the C-end market of popular music, cuts from the B-end to copyright operation early, and pays attention to the universality of music quality education. Therefore, although it is in a relatively unpopular circle, its unique operating model may be able to break a path for it in the classical music industry. Moreover, the characteristics of classical music are that there is no geographical distinction, the space for international operation is greater, and it is currently actively expanding new businesses, and the future development is worthy of attention.
<h1>Classical music is "cold", but the future can be expected</h1>
Although classical music seems to be drifting away from modern life, whether it is the magnificent symphony in American dramas or the lullaby before falling asleep in reality, we have actually met classical music countless times.
Classical music, which has been impacted by the wave of the transformation of the music industry to streaming media, has never been far from our lives, but has become more and more popular among young people in the increasingly cookie-cutter pop music market.
In August 2020, streaming platform Deezer, the British Recording Industry Association (BPI) and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) published a joint report. The data shows that in the past year, young people aged 18-25 accounted for a third (34%) of classical music fans worldwide. 37% of British classical music fans on Deezer are under the age of 35, up 17% from last year. A report released by Midia Research also shows that in 2018, classical music recordings generated $384 million in revenue worldwide, and streaming revenue grew by 46% to $141 million.
But classical music is still a niche market compared to popular music. Data tracking service Alpha Data showed in December that classical music accounted for 2.5 percent of U.S. record sales and less than 1 percent of streaming.
In other words, if you want to make the cake bigger, classical music can't be in a corner of the physical record, and streaming is the future it can't help but face. If Cook Music is the forerunner of leading classical music to embrace the Internet, more than a decade later, as long as you want to listen to classical music, many streaming platforms can meet the demand. But platform algorithms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon focus more on current pop hits, while Schubert and Puccini's songs are often lost in metadata.
In this context, later streaming platforms saw their market gaps and joined the field of classical music streaming services. For example, Qobuz from France and Idagio from Germany provide a rich library of classical music, high-quality sound quality, excellent search function, complete library resources, free applications and magazines available around the world. In 2019, Sony China also announced the launch of the high-resolution streaming music service platform "Sony Select Hi-Res Music", which focuses on jazz and classical music.
Musical Heralds noted that classical music label Decca was equally brilliant in the wave of classical music revival in the streaming era. Its 2018 production and release of Andre Bocelli's album Si sold more than 200,000 copies (including streaming albums), becoming the first classical record champion to cross that threshold since 2012.
At the same time, Decca's black cellist Sheku Canne-Mason and a number of new generation of British musical geniuses have exploded on the Internet, Italian composer Rudovico Iody has become the leader of classical artists in the field of streaming services with 15,000 singles and 2 billion views, and the documentary "Pavarotti" produced and released in 2019 has global sales of up to $150 million.
It can be seen that at the moment when streaming media is booming, it proves that classical music can ride this high-speed train to reach the audience, connect the market, and leverage consumption with a variety of different faces that are more in line with the current communication methods.
<h1>How does classical music "break the circle" in the context of modern communication? </h1>
Today, classical music is gradually penetrating the consumer market through diversified commercial operations, but if you want to further leverage the mass consumer market, art popularization and self-marketing are crucial. As Idagio CEO Thiel Janzukovich put it: "The impact of classical music in the age of streaming is not a crisis for a music genre, but a crisis for the way an industry is packaged." ”
On December 16 last year, the day of Beethoven's 250th birthday, Sony decided to rub beethoven's heat on the official Weibo of the voice, but it was tragically overturned: Beethoven, a hearing-impaired patient, put on Sony noise-canceling headphones.
In fact, Beethoven has long become a big IP in the classical music industry, using him to market countless cases, such as the Shenzhen Concert Hall launched the "Meet Beethoven" pop-up store in September this year, and in the past few years, there have been Telecom Cup Beethoven competitions, music games "Beethoven Virus", movies "Copy Beethoven" and so on.
Why do marketers love Beethoven? As early as 1911, Master Hongyi Li Shutong first introduced Beethoven in the "Music Magazine" he founded. He hoped that domestic education could use school music to promote national character, because Beethoven not only had great music, but also had a charisma. At that time, Li Shutong did not know that the practice of turning strangers into cultural symbols was the creation of IP that is very popular today.
In 2020, the various commemorative booms around Beethoven in China have also been higher than a wave. First, the Shanghai Grand Theatre launched the "Tribute to Le Saint Beethoven" series of performances, and then the re-equipped Shanghai Concert Hall launched the Beethoven Exhibition. A while ago, Led by Shanghai People's Radio Classic 947, 100 musicians at home and abroad paid tribute to Beethoven with a 16-hour marathon concert. Participating in this wave, there is also the most popular video website for young people - B station, from December 13 to 17, Yu Lu, a young conductor and up master of B station, and the Ningbo Symphony Orchestra challenged 9 Beethoven symphonies for 5 days, and the whole process was broadcast exclusively on station B.
The industry's admiration for Beethoven is the same as the love of B station players for the music area in the station. The data shows that 104,000 videos under the classical music channel of Station B have been watched more than 300 million times, UP main @ Crimson Feifei's "Beethoven Virus" was launched in only ten days, and the number of views exceeded 500,000, and the "Moonlight Sonata" adapted by UP main @TSAR - was full of cyberpunk flavor, reaching 1.24 million views in only 20 days.
The young attributes of the small broken station and the prosperity of the PUGC ecology have also made the communication form of classical music innovative, and the communication effectiveness has also been greatly improved. It is reported that the annual submission volume of classical music videos on Station B has increased from more than 14,000 in 2017 to nearly 100,000 in 2020, maintaining an average annual growth rate of more than 200%. Compared with 2017, the number of classical music contributors and the number of broadcasts in 2020 have increased by more than 5 times.
To some extent, Beethoven has transformed into a cultural symbol that has entered the masses, and the great inclusiveness of its string quartet like a universe of ideas best represents the comfort that classical music gives to modern music and even life. Just as German residents opened their windows during the pandemic and played "Ode to Joy" on the balcony to reduce the mourning of the disaster. Therefore, classical music should not only be used as an embellishment and decoration, but to be able to truly return to the market of modern music and nourish the development of various musical genres.
As the creativity that came with the Beatles' courageous attempt at classical music, it has always conveyed an important message in the history of popular music: the past of music is valuable, fascinating and fascinating; classical music is not just a spring and snow, but needs to be accepted by the public in an appropriate way.
<h1>Precursor topic</h1>
Topic content: At present, in what form does classical music still exist in our daily lives?
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