From leaving Baidu to start a business now, Zou Yang, the founder of Jam Culture, was most impressed by two moments.
The first was in June 2015, when the team finally had their own office space. Although it was not a regular office building, it was just a place vacated in his house, but it felt very happy at the time.
On the first day of the move, he and his partners Zhu Chunlong and Zhu Hongyong stood side by side, leaving the first photo of the jam team.
From left: Zhu Hongyong, Zhu Chunlong, Zou Yang
Another moment is that in December 2017, Jam Culture held the "Jam Planet" Thousand People Concert at the Nanjing Sun Palace Theater, and the team took a group photo on the stage.
In two years, jam culture has accumulated from 0 fans to millions of accurate users; from Nanjing to more than 20 cities across the country; from an open day attended by dozens of people to a thousand concerts.
In the blink of an eye, 2017 to now, another two years have passed.
On the fourth anniversary, jam culture is still running wild.
Zou Yang graduated from graduate school and went to Baidu as a research and development engineer, and after two years in the Fengchao team, he began to get a little tired of writing only code. It's not that I don't like it, it's that I find it difficult to use my various wild ideas.
He has never forgotten the self he was when he formed a band in college, and the more he thought about it, the more he felt that he should leave his job to start a business.
My own musical dream was not realized at the beginning, and now I will realize others as a company.
That's cool.
Later, he met Zhu Chunlong, a music self-media person, and Zhu Hongyong, a technical partner. Jam's earliest team of three people was formally formed.
"We want to do a lot of work in the audio entertainment industry!"
On September 11, 2015, the jam music website was officially launched.
At the end of 2015, its WeChat public account was launched, and in one year, it accumulated 300,000 fans, becoming a rare music trumpet on the WeChat charts. Because of our clear attitude, many people think that our newborn calves are not afraid of tigers and come chaotically. In fact, we have already set a rule internally:
Any article with critical overtones must be from a neutral and objective point of view, with the motivation of content for good, bringing valuable thinking to the industry.
We just want to restore the truth. If we have a wrong point of view, everyone can disagree and can refute it, but please respect each other's right to express their opinions.
For jam, we have a responsibility to make public opinion in this industry more and more positive and more true. The entertainment industry itself is a community of interests, and the players in it are definitely not a competitive relationship, but a prosperous and a loss.
Only when everyone looks forward together and does things with an open and win-win mentality can we usher in the spring of the industry.
Jam Culture Bureau, Liang Long, Zang Hongfei, Mu Ma, Zeng Ke, Lu Zhongqiang, You You, Wang Shuo and others are communicating
Jam Culture has been relentlessly covering musicians since its inception. As of September 11, 2019, 2,448 have been reported in four full years.
We have always believed that musicians are the cornerstone of the entire entertainment industry, and whether the industry can prosper for a long time depends on them.
For example, in the "Summer of the Band" fire tour group and penicillin, Jam gave them a video interview in 2018.
To this day, we've maintained our tradition of interviewing a fledgling musician every week.
In 2015, when the company was just formed, everyone was idealistic, did not think much about reality, and only wanted to do what they thought was valuable. But from 2016, we began to consider the market demand and slowly began to work closely with the big players in the industry.
This is not a compromise, but maturity. The development of the company must rely on close cooperation with upstream and downstream industries to complete.
In the first half of 2016, Zou Yang made a combing of the content form in the entire audio entertainment industry, and determined that variety shows will definitely become the most energetic content forms in the industry, followed by music festivals, concerts and single audio.
Since then, we have cooperated deeply with various variety shows.
For example, in the "China Star" in early 2016, after the jam culture reported on several major events, it produced a number of explosive articles, achieving a win-win situation between the media and variety shows.
Recently, "Summer of the Band" and "Let's Band Together", we are even more deeply involved in the whole process from pre-planning to post-detonation topics.
In 2018, a landmark event occurred in the music entertainment industry, and two idol variety shows turned out to be the first year of domestic idols. After two years of development, domestic idols have long been different from the past, singing and dancing are good, and there are not a few idols who will create.
Before the show was over, Jam's interactive entertainment team began to create social entertainment products with the fan economy as the core.
As of today, our Mini Program Matrix users have exceeded 10 million, with a daily increase of 20,000+ growth, a new next-day retention of 48%, and an incredible daily usage time of 28.3min.
The above achievements rely not only on the efficient execution and creativity of the team, but also on our down-to-earth efforts to go deep into the industry.
In the past two years, the interactive entertainment team has established close ties with more than 200 station sisters (referring to fans who serve as managers in a celebrity support association). These support group sisters can leverage thousands of people, and more than 100,000 or hundreds of thousands of people.
Why do we value the fan economy so much?
As far as the macro situation is concerned, when a country's per capita GDP exceeds 10,000 US dollars, the cultural industry will usher in a big outbreak. The average GDP of the 2018 Chinese given by the NDRC is about 9900 US dollars. That is to say, we are at this historical juncture.
In the future, jam culture will continue to deepen the industry and continue to bring happiness and value to users.
We want to be the world's leading fan entertainment company, respect the laws of the industry, deeply cultivate the community, strengthen barriers, and attach importance to offline.
At the same time, we will use the resources of South Korea, France and the United States to develop into an international company and promote excellent domestic artists to the world.
At the scene of the fourth anniversary, Zou Yang, the founder of jam culture, gave a speech
Jam Culture has two major businesses, one is cultural media based on music cross-border, and the other is social entertainment based on fan economy. At present, the industry value of both exists to serve upstream content and help them connect with a large number of accurate users.
According to our observation, at present, upstream content, such as artists, variety shows, music festivals, etc., has good content but will not be packaged, some have poor content but are good at packaging, and some have poor content and packaging.
In any industry, understanding users is understanding the market.
In the past four years, the process of accumulating tens of millions of users through media and products is also the process of our growing understanding of the entertainment needs of young people.
Jam culture is suitable at this stage and is good at doing it.
Jam culture upgraded logo
From the beginning, Zou Yang clearly understood the importance of a good organizational structure to a company. The last two years have felt more deeply. When the company is large enough to a certain scale, without a strong organizational structure to support, no matter how strong the strategy may not work.
Over the past four years, he said, Jam Culture has cultivated three partner-level executives who are sometimes happier to see them grow than they grow.
One of them was Xie Cheng, who had just graduated from college and had been killed from Tianjin to Nanjing for four years. Now he is the head of the cultural media sector, overseeing the media business.
In the next four years, Zou Yang set himself a goal to train at least six more executives like Xie Cheng to become partners in jam culture. Starting this year, the company will take business and values as two-way indicators, and select 1-2 places per year by full voting.
These people will become the cornerstone of the company's development in the next ten or twenty years, and together determine the future fate of jam culture.
The founding team of Jam Culture cuts the cake
The first two years of jam culture are the 1.0 stage, positioned as a new music media, mainly to report artists, report industry facts, and do a good job in music media content;
Jam is now in the 2.0 stage, positioned as a music entertainment media, deeply cultivating the music entertainment industry, serving upstream content, and connecting more users for them;
The 3.0 stage of jam culture is positioned as a media group, laying out the whole industry chain of audio and entertainment content, and creating a sense of happiness for Chinese young people.
With the advancement of science and technology, the future entertainment content will undergo a round of major upgrades in the form of expression, but in fact, the basic elements are nothing more than two dimensions of visual and auditory.
Jam culture will grasp the essence of entertainment, ride the wind and waves in this round of consumption upgrading and technological innovation, and become a company of 1 billion US dollars, or even 5 billion US dollars.
It's hard, but we're willing to try.
Finally, thank you all, and we'll see you for our next fourth anniversary!