Figure/IC
The past year has been half a disaster for the music industry and half an opportunity for transformation. Offline performances have suffered a disaster, but the payment of online live broadcast and streaming content has ushered in the maturity of audience concepts. At the end of April 2020, the "Believe in the Future" charity performance jointly launched by various music platforms once became the biggest music topic of the year. But at the end of last year, Shrimp Music, which played a central role in coordinating the event, announced that it would officially close on February 5.
Since the closure of Shrimp Mi on a Weibo post on November 29 last year, the discussion about why Shrimp Mi fell has become a "must-answer question" for all music media. The slogan of "EARN MUSIC & MONEY", shouted by this music website/APP at the beginning of its business in 2006, has finally become a regret that "the middle road has collapsed before the start-up is halfway through". However, today, when the shrimp is about to be officially shut down, we may think more about "what will happen after the shrimp is gone?" ”
Streaming: From "Three Kingdoms Killing" to TME's dominance
Wang Hao, the former CEO of Shrimp Rice, said when connecting with "Bad Guy FM": "If you are lucky enough to survive, it will not be much different from Tencent and NetEase. ”
In the streaming music platform pattern after the disappearance of Shrimp Mi, the dominance of TME seems to be sooner or later. According to the data of Ai Media Consulting, as early as December 2019, Tencent's QQ, Kugou and Kuwo three APPS have firmly occupied the top three places in the number of monthly active users of China's mobile music clients, with a volume of 300 million, 200 million and 100 million respectively. After that, NetEase Cloud Music is around 80 million. At that time, the monthly active users of Shrimp Mi were only about 28 million. So when many people's impression of streaming media APP is still hovering in the "QQ, NetEase, Shrimp rice three-legged standing", in fact, this market is almost the overall situation has been determined. Many users who are now nostalgic for Shrimp Music have already voted with their feet.
In 2019, the number of monthly active users of mainstream mobile music clients in China (10,000). Source: Ai Media Consulting. Cartography/Beijing News Tian Kaini
NetEase Cloud Music, which is still playing the role of the second pole, is preparing to seize the expiration of the exclusive agreement between TME and the three major records after obtaining Alibaba's strategic investment and re-intervene in the heavyweight copyright competition. At the same time, NetEase and TME also began to carry out the layout of ABC terminal integration. NetEase Cloud alone coordinated artists and works to launch a compilation album of "Not Only _ Visible to Yourself", TME simply acquired the shares of record companies and long audio APP, and everyone was developing their own upstream and downstream to form a complete industrial chain. These are all things that Shrimp Mi once wanted to do but did not do in a hurry.
But on the other hand, we should note that TME's dominance does not stem from the fact that they have purchased more music rights or discovered better music content, but more because of their monopolistic advantage in the social field. Even in the 2020 Q3 financial report shows that TME users reached 51.7 million and the online music service payment rate reached 8%, its revenue generated solely on music payment still cannot cover the expenditure generated by copyright procurement and product development.
TME and NetEase Cloud Music have now opened up exclusive online columns or columns for musicians.
The obsession with "making money with music itself" is out, which once again highlights the fact that whether it is in the era of music such as records, color bells, or the Internet, content is being held back by channels. After streaming media entered the two strong era of TME and NetEase Cloud, how NetEase Cloud should make up for the disadvantages in channels determines how long this confrontation can last. If Ali and NetEase cannot fully integrate the channels such as Weibo and e-commerce that they still hold, then streaming media will not be too long to enter the era of "three points into one".
But at the end of the day, the competition within streaming platforms is actually less important, because under the impact of short videos, it takes 3-5 minutes to unfold a song, and the streaming media itself, which is mainly presented in audio form, is old. The disappearance of shrimp rice is actually a portrayal of the volume of the medium itself that can no longer accommodate a third place.
Whether it is NetEase Cloud or TME, the problem that it will eventually face is: in another three or five years, the kind of music with pictures within a minute may be the standard format. In that case, who is the boss of streaming media?
A new balance of two mediums, two routes
In the face of the crowding of people's attention by short video platforms, even TME can't think of any way other than actively hugging.
In the past TMEA music festival, a singer who was nicknamed one of the "QQ Music Big Three" in the early days won the trophy of male singer-songwriter of the year, but to his and his team's confusion, the same night's annual female singer-songwriter award was awarded to Mengran, who created the annual hot single "Teenager" of Douyin. Afterwards, he left the trophy at the front desk of the venue in a daze.
This scene vividly illustrates the instinctive resistance of a system to a newer and more powerful system, and the reason why TME can stand in the industry. Awards of the same magnitude will be awarded to a short video musician who has been the top of the platform since the start-up of the platform and a short video musician who is not as good as the former in terms of seniority and musical literacy, but has made a traffic explosion. This seems to be guan gong war Qin Qiong, but from another point of view, it is also a spirit of seeking truth from facts.
In 2020, Douyin's daily active users reached 600 million. If the rise of short video three years ago was still a "new thing", then it is the norm for a large number of users to rely on the cocoon of short video information. In such a case, in 2021, ByteDance and Kuaishou respectively launched "Feile" and "Komori Records" into the streaming media ecology, after the departure of Shrimp Mi, these challengers from the other dimension will bring whether it is a painless bite or a thunderous dimensionality reduction blow, it is worth waiting to see.
There are more and more music-related APP applications in users' mobile phones, and if the short video platform enters the game, the platform competition will be more intense. Figure/IC
In an era when pop music as a separate industry has never recovered from the depression of the 2000s, and then ushered in the challenges of new media, it has quietly completed alienation in the past few years. Today, the two pillars of the industry are the fan economy and the copyright of works.
On one side is the ultimate idolization: creating idols as commodities, songs essentially exist only as star-chasing peripherals. On the other hand, short video music works can be widely disseminated without being attached to singers, and their copyrights become the main body of transactions. For capital, both are paths to faster returns, while for users, they are more precise to meet their specific needs.
TME and Douyin are currently the strongest practitioners of these two general directions. One is constantly refreshing digital record sales with endless idols, and the other is creating wave after wave of hot orders with a firm mass line. But just as TMEA's favor for short video music this year and Byte's launch of "Feile", in the future, the two media, two routes, will inevitably blend in confrontation until some balance is reached and the "new normal" of the music industry is formed.
Musicians: From Artists to "Workers"
Whether it is TME or Douyin, no matter which of the new routes they take, their common feature is to take the "musicians" from the center of the industry. Like the Hong Kong and Taiwan music scenes in the past, the era of musicians as creators and interpreters occupying the spotlight on the stage has gradually drifted away.
One reflection of the current scene is that a musician released a new work last year, and the company promoted it for him on Douyin, and paid for a celebrity to cover the song. In the week or two since, the results have left the singer ambivalent.
"That song is quite popular with him (internet celebrities), I think this work has received recognition very happy, many people have also found the original song page on NetEase Cloud, which has increased the amount of listening and commenting." But their messages are 'from XXX', 'Thank you XXX'. It feels weird. He said.
The same musician, after participating in the Shrimp Mi Light Project 5 years ago, he cooperated with a very good production team to launch a single, this single was placed on the home page of Shrimp Mi, and there was a supporting tour after the release, although not much, but the single play brought him transparent income, and the whole process made him feel very comfortable.
Xiami's "Light Seeking Project" will select the musicians with the most user recognition and potential to help them produce albums, shoot MVs, promote and hold concerts. Cheng Bi's album "I Want to Waste Time with You" was the work of the Light Seeking Project.
But in today's Internet. Our attention is being watched by everyone to get a piece of the pie. In this flat world, there is such a huge amount of competition from different dimensions. It has become unrealistic for musicians to want the sense of dignity they used to have at Shrimp Rice. In addition to the departure of Shrimp Mi, the "Singer" program, which also focuses on traditional singers, also came to an end in 2020.
Cheng Xiang, who launched popular singles such as "The World Is So Big or Meet You" and "Four Seasons to You" on Douyin, said in an interview that after entering the creation of short videos in 2018, he did a lot of subtraction in singing, removed rich techniques and expressions, and achieved better results. "The singer tries to zero in the work, so that the listener has the space to substitute himself into it." She said.
At present, the work intensity of short video music people is very large, and they have to maintain output every day. Whether it is the form of work, workload or income, there is no difference between going to work. For artists with poor standards, "find a class" has also become a daily mockery of listeners.
To put it another way, the concepts of "musician" or "singer" used in the music scene since the 1980s seem to be a middleman between "work" and "user". Eliminating or replacing middlemen is typical thinking in the Internet era.
At the moment, the music industry is returning to its service nature. At present, after the training of the music school, entering an MCN company, engaged in creation, production, performance work, has formed a complete industrial chain, everyone is a working worker on the flowing water. This also includes traffic idols who have a large number of fans but only receive a few thousand yuan per month in the contract.
A more ordinary, but bigger piece of cake
2020 China Online Music Performance Users Music Platform Preference Survey (%). Source: Ai Media Consulting
Cartography/Beijing News Tian Kaini
The good news is that the cake does get a little bigger.
When looking back at the demise of Shrimp Rice, we find some very forward-looking attempts, such as the use of activities such as the "Light Seeking Project" to discover musicians, the more upstream layout of the industry, the integration of ABC (artists, companies and users) during the Ali Planet period, the idea of establishing a business cycle, and so on. In fact, it is what TME and NetEase Cloud and other new entrants have been doing in recent years.
These forward-looking assumptions and rough executions make Shrimp Mi or the entire Ali music department look like a wang mang-like suspected crosser. It seems to be holding a set of future answers answering a paper of past exam questions. 5 years ago, when online music payment rates were extremely low, it is not surprising that such attempts failed.
According to former employees of Shrimp Rice, since the end of 2018, Shrimp Rice has almost stopped all aggressive activities, just maintaining daily operations and waiting for the end that will eventually come. It is somewhat regrettable that China's online music payment rate has been increasing at a high speed since then.
Once a year, I will share my experience and observations of the industry in Peking University's "Chinese Pop Music Streaming" course, and starting in 2018, I will survey the number of VIP users in the class who have purchased at least one streaming platform. In 2018, only a few students raised their hands, in 2019 this proportion exceeded 30%, and in 2020, more than 80% of students began to pay for music. This is, of course, just a survey of young people interested in popular music in institutions of higher learning, but the trend is not deceptive, and "if you like music, you have to pay" is becoming a common idea again.
In 2020, the sales of digital albums ushered in an explosion, although most of the records themselves are only the subject of fans to chase stars, but there is no shortage of surprises such as the sales of the universal youth hostel "Hebei Southwest Forest Road Line" exceeded 10 million. Listeners no longer have a sense of nostalgia for the music industry, but on a more practical level, the necessity of music in their lives is increasing.
Over the years, the role of music as a medium in Chinese life has undergone subtle but far-reaching changes. This requires practitioners to fundamentally adjust their beliefs in popular music. In Shrimp Mi's love for pop music, they can do their best to organize "believe in the future", but this feeling has long tripped their own steps to the future.
But after shrimp rice left, music is becoming a more ordinary, but more solid service industry.
□ Excellent Works (Music Critic)
Beijing News Editor Tian Kaini Proofreader Li Shihui
Source: Beijing News