Reporter | Classical classics
A few days ago, Xiami Music announced that it would close the service from February 5, 2021, which caused a lot of shock in the music circle and the venture capital circle. Many people may have forgotten when they last used shrimp rice to listen to songs, but it carries the youth memories of many people and satisfies people's imagination of a high-quality music community. "For some people, shrimp is the corner where the soul is placed," one music lover said to the pencil. Once upon a time, shrimp rice was synonymous with professional music. Whether you are a music enthusiast or a beginner, you can find your love. In the farewell letter, the team of Shrimp Music stressed that every update and iteration of the product is to return to the music itself. "But it's unavoidable that we missed some key opportunities in our development. In the acquisition of music copyright content, it has not been able to meet the diversified music needs of users, which is also our biggest regret. ” After interviews and research, Pencil Road summarized the reasons why shrimp rice went to the fate of "falling", about three: First, have the temperament, do not make money, and always can not find a suitable profit model. Second, in the copyright war, they have been defeated one after another, failing to seize the window period of capital and completely handing over the battlefield to others. Third, it is difficult to integrate into Ali's corporate culture, and it is constantly retreating from the center of the stage, losing both traffic and temperament. This year, this 13-year-old music platform will completely bid farewell to the public, and also let the generation of post-90s who grew up listening to the music of the Internet niche sigh "Grandpa Qingjie". Today's music platform copyright war seems to have been decided, but it is undeniable that no matter in the ecosystem of which Internet manufacturer, the music platform is an embarrassing existence, high cost, difficult to make profits, and the user's willingness to pay has not been the expected level. Perhaps the model that really fits the development of online music has not yet emerged. One practitioner believes that "music platforms still need a technological revolution to truly retail music products." This price is not 0 yuan, nor is it 12 yuan (the monthly membership fee of most platforms). If one day anyone figures out the price, it's the price that society is willing to pay for music. ”
Note: The content of this article is mainly from the reporter interviewed by pencil road and the public information on the Internet, and the arguments are inevitably biased and not deliberately misleading.
Temperamental platforms do not make money
In 2007, music enthusiast Wang Hao left Ali, who had worked for four years, and began to work as a music sharing community. The following year, shrimp mesh was launched.
That was when the digital wave of music was just emerging. Users said goodbye to CDs and tapes and began to look for their favorite music on the Internet, and Shrimp Mi became a paradise for a small group of music lovers.
Lei Yu was a singer-songwriter who later transformed into a business in the field of music copyright services. He recalls his adolescence when he loved r&b, but after searching for music platforms such as Baidu and Kumei, there was only a blank space until he met Shrimp Mi. "Kugou launched an online k-song at that time, allowing you to turn your home into a ktv; and Shrimp Mi is constantly refining its label, so that you can retrieve a variety of independent musicians." It's two worlds. ”
The temperament of dried shrimp is unique. Its original model was p2p (peer to peer), users upload music, edit playlists, improve musician profiles, and aggregate a high-quality community of enthusiasts in a short period of time; its music recommendations did not fully cater to public preferences, but wanted to let listeners discover more. Wang Hao once told the media that Shrimp Mi will not recommend singers who are well known to the public to users, but will recommend the 10% that everyone does not understand.
People who have used shrimp rice will affirm its temperament. "I have a daily recommendation that I get up every day to brush shrimp rice, and I can always find some songs that surprise me," one shrimp user told Pencil, and for a while the heavy music lovers around her were almost all using shrimp rice. Another "shrimp friend", Ash Ash, has been listening to rock and ancient music in Shrimp Mi since high school, and found a lot of small stations of independent musicians. "Shrimp Mi has a feeling of making music very seriously, rather than blindly catching up with the pop."
The temperament of shrimp rice also attracts capital. According to the data, in January 2008 and June 2010, Xiami Music completed two rounds of financing.
Netizens in their hearts listen to songs despise the chain
But for the industry, the rise of streaming platforms has clearly upset the order. In the past, musicians could earn decent income from physical albums, but after the rise of the digital wave, the living space of musicians became more and more cramped. "It was a very strange era of pure piracy, and everyone could only make money on color bells," Lei Yu said.
The early solution of Shrimp Mi was that users could listen to the UGC song library online for free, but if they downloaded high-quality music with a 320k bitrate, they needed to pay for it. But this solution didn't make musicians buy it. In 2010, Li Zhi and Zhou Yunpeng joined forces with more than a dozen folk singers to boycott Shrimp Mi, saying that the music works provided by Xia Mi for download were not authorized by the creators. In 2012, Zuo Xiaozu cursed shrimp rice on Weibo, saying that he had never received money.
Musicians can't make money, and the platform can't make money. On the one hand, the high royalties, on the other hand, the user's willingness to pay, the forward movement of shrimp is becoming heavier. Wang Hao once told the media that the annual copyright fee paid by Shrimp Rice is more than ten times the scale of income.
After six or seven years of subsistence, Shrimp Rice finally decided to turn to Ali. No one expected that this superficial marriage laid the foundation for the final defeat of Shrimp Mi.
Lose the copyright war
When it was acquired by Ali in 2013, Shrimp Mi was a lookout for the industry. With tags such as "the most comprehensive music classification", "the most diversified music library" and "niche music takers", The registered users of Shrimp Mi reached 20 million.
At that time, Everyday Sound had been taken under Ali's command. In March 2015, Everyday Sound and Shrimp Music merged into Ali Music. In Ali's planning, every day is beautiful for the mass music market, shrimp mi takes the route of professional musicians, and the two can go hand in hand to win the share of the music market.
However, Ali's reaction was still slow.
In 2015, the state issued the "strictest copyright order", requiring all copyright-free music to be removed by July 31 of that year. For a time, a copyright battle was set off between major music platforms. Ali merged Everyday Sound and Shrimp Music, precisely to face the attack of competitors in the copyright war, but entered the game too late and was robbed by Tencent.
In 2014, long before the new copyright policy was introduced, Tencent began to contact three major international record labels - Universal, Sony and Warner (hereinafter referred to as the "Big Three"). As of May 2017, Tencent has reached strategic cooperation with the "Big Three", setting up copyright barriers that are difficult to shake. In addition, qq music also established Tencent Music Entertainment Group (tme) in July 2016 with the digital music business of Kugou and Kuwo Ocean Music. At this point, Tencent has completely sat on the top spot of the digital music platform.
Lei Yu said that Tencent's preemptive entry has inflated the price of copyright and blocked other competitors out. "In 2016, when we went to talk about the 'Big Three', the offer was 8 million; in 2017, it directly doubled to 130 million." He introduced that the price of copyright is determined by the market, and in the era of rampant piracy, it was all cabbage prices. "Now, copyright has become a commercial weapon. If this competition continues, other players will have to starve to death. ”
Shrimp rice has broken a good hand, which makes investors who have long paid attention to the entertainment industry feel sorry. Yang Ge, the founding partner of Xinghan Capital, believes that Shrimp Mi has today's ending because after joining Ali, he missed the best window period for capital operation. "It should take advantage of the fact that the business volume of competitors is not rising, and first use the power of Ali to do mergers and acquisitions and industrial clusters, so as to form competitive barriers."
The logic of business operation is cruel, after losing the copyright war, Shrimp Mi has never been able to turn over. According to iResearch's "2016 China Online Music Industry Research Report", in 2016, the coverage rate of Kugou, qq music and kuwo music in music copyright was 90%, while Ali Music was only 20%. Statistics show that from 2015 to 2016, the size of qq music's music library has reached 15 million, while shrimp music has only 4 million songs.
"Most people still listen to Jay Chou, Mayday, bts, shrimp rice did not grab these resources, users will definitely lose," said the former shrimp user Ash Ash. The data provided by questmobile shows that as of July 2018, the mAU of qq music was 290 million, and the mau of shrimp music was 22.77 million, less than one-tenth of qq music.
Ali can't do entertainment?
Xiami, who lost its copyright, has become more and more passive in the competition with Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud. However, in Lei Yu's view, the mismatch between shrimp rice and Ali culture is the deep-seated reason for the fall of shrimp rice.
When he first joined Ali, Shrimp Mi was ambitious in his exploration of professional music. In 2014, Shrimp Music launched a year-long "Light Seeking Project", which brought together a group of independent musicians such as Sound Toys, Cupy, Jin Weiqi, Cheng Bi, Yanchi, Whale Circus, etc., and produced 14 records for them, receiving 160 million auditions.
Shrimp Mi Music "Light Seeking Project"
For musicians, Shrimp Rice also gives a high degree of autonomy. Cheng Bi mentioned in an interview that year: "Shrimp Mi's attitude towards our musicians is that you have good music, we can promote it, but your development is your own business, they will not participate." ”
"Whether it is for musicians or users, Shrimp Mi is respectful enough." Lei Yu believes that when Shrimp Rice was initially incorporated into Ali, he still wanted to maintain this temperament, so it was inevitable to form a confrontation with Ali's corporate culture. But apparently, the arms can't be twisted on the thighs.
The rout of the confrontation begins with a shake in the management. According to CBN, Liu Chunning, former general manager of Tencent's online video department, parachuted into Ali in 2013 to directly manage Shrimp Music. Soon after Liu Chunning arrived, he asked the shrimp team to move from the office space in hangzhou to Ali's Xixi Park headquarters. According to the recollection of former employees of Shrimp Rice, after this move, the founder team of Shrimp Rice gradually lost its right to speak.
In January 2016, Wang Hao was transferred from Shrimp Music and transferred to DingTalk. He said bluntly in the circle of friends at that time that he did not want to make music anymore, "I have been in this industry for eight years, the original intention was to let this industry keep up with the times, but now the status quo of the industry has been absurd to the point of outrageous." ”
After the management change, Shrimp Rice has some radical attempts in commercialization, but the effect is not ideal. Lei Yu recalled that Ali once let Taobao stores access shrimp players, which can push music when users enter the store, which was "fried" in the music circle at that time. "If you let Song Dongye's song appear in the shop that sells slippers, everyone will definitely not be happy." He believes that the shrimp rice that was included in Ali has lost respect for the industry, and this was once the place where shrimp rice was most proud. Ali sees this group of musicians as assets that can be monetized. It doesn't know how to deal with this group of people. ”
Yang Ge believes that Ali's e-commerce attributes and the cultural attributes of shrimp rice are difficult to integrate. "Ali's traffic focus is on e-commerce and finance, if you want to cut into the traffic of the 2C market of entertainment, there is still a gap." Although Ali has strong funds, there is no bonus effect on the business of shrimp rice. "In contrast, qq music and NetEase Cloud are backed by the content ecology of Tencent and NetEase, and it is easier to generate linkage in traffic."
When Shrimp Rice is becoming increasingly marginalized in Ali, NetEase Cloud is in full swing within NetEase as an independent project. Independent musicians are also beginning to shift positions. Since 2014, NetEase Cloud began to recruit independent musicians, and in 2016, it invested 200 million yuan to launch the "Stone Plan" to support independent musicians, holding three consecutive seasons. By 2020, the total number of original musicians gathered on netease cloud exceeded 200,000, and the total number of original music works exceeded 1.5 million.
Even Ali has sided with NetEase Cloud. In September 2019, NetEase Cloud received a $700 million series of B+ financing, and Alibaba was one of the investors. This is seen by the outside world as a signal that Ali will give up shrimp rice and switch to NetEase Cloud.
The Distant "Profit Dream"
The "fall" of shrimp rice is a landmark event in the digital music industry, but players are far from the endgame.
For users, listening to songs is becoming an increasingly troublesome thing. Music lover He Xinyi told Pencil Dao that he now mainly uses NetEase Cloud to listen to songs, but in order to occasionally listen to one or two Jay Chou or Mayday, he is still a green diamond member of QQ Music. This means that he recharges more than $20 per month on both platforms.
"In the past, songs from other platforms were downloaded and imported into the NetEase cloud, but now it is impossible," he said, adding that after major music platforms built a moat with copyright, switching between different apps to listen to songs has become the norm.
Music lovers have to spend more money on listening to songs, but it's also difficult to support the plates of digital music platforms. Tencent TME said in its financial report for the second quarter of 2020 that the user subscription revenue reached 1.31 billion yuan, and the scale of paying users exceeded 50 million. However, Tencent Music's MAU is 650 million, so the proportion of paying users is only 7%.
"At present, the major platforms are still in the stage of burning money, and basically have not explored a profit model," a music practitioner told Pencil. Tencent Music is mainly enriched by social entertainment businesses such as "national k songs", and the value of the arpu (average income per user) of the latter is 10 times that of the former; while Shrimp Mi has Ali leans in, it has not explored a profit model, and it is difficult to drain Ali's e-commerce business, which naturally becomes an outcast.
Talking about the future direction of the digital music industry, Lei Yu believes that music platforms still need a technological revolution to truly retail music products.
"The product of the future is going to make enough people willing to pay for music, just like you go to the supermarket to buy something." This price is not 0 yuan, nor is it 12 yuan (the monthly membership fee of most platforms), which may be in the range of 0-12. If one day anyone figures out the price, it's the price that society is willing to pay for music. ”
The war in the online music industry is still not over.
(At the request of the interviewee, Lei Yu is a pseudonym)
Edit | Wu Jinna