Jay Chou announces new songs, Warner praises tiktok, and the vibrato is not just a ＂divine comedy＂？
Wen | Fu Qiongyin, Jiang Yuqi
On June 8th, Jay Chou uploaded a prelude to the new song Mojito on his Aauto Quicker account, which is the first time that Aauto Quicker has been used as his own music announcement platform since Jay Chou settled in Aauto Quicker.
If we say that this past weekend, Aauto Quicker’s "Ollie Give" advertisement on social platforms made people re-understand Aauto Quicker’s "local culture" to some extent, then earlier Jay Chou settled in and joined hands with Jewel Music, it was a somewhat subversive platform brand "remodeling".
So many people who don’t pay attention to Aauto Quicker can’t help asking: Why did Jay Chou choose Aauto Quicker?
It is widely believed that behind this hand-in-hand, "Aauto Quicker needs Jay Chou"; But inPoisonous eyes (WeChat ID:youhaoxifilm）It seems that this is a win-win cooperation. Short video platforms represented by Aauto Quicker and Tik Tok are relying on their powerful influence.It stirs up the pattern of the music market and industry, and sometimes even affects the fate of many big companies and musicians.
It may be hard to convince people if they just throw out the above point of view. Because in the public’s cognition, when talking about the connection between Aauto Quicker and Tik Tok and music, people may first think of all kinds of "divine comedy" and shouting wheat, which is difficult to relate to mainstream music culture. But in fact, whether at home or overseas, the development of the music industry is increasingly inseparable from the support of short videos.
On June 3rd, local time, Warner Music, one of the largest record companies in the world, was officially listed on NASDAQ, and issued 77 million shares. Warner Music’s final stock issue price reached $25, and the closing price on the day of listing was $30.12, up by 20.48%, and the company’s market value also reached $15.3 billion.
Warner Music (Source: vision china)
According to public information, dozens of internationally renowned investment banks, including Morgan Stanley, have participated in the IPO of Warner Music, so this is the largest IPO in the US stock market this year. Behind Warner Music’s massive "Road to Stock Market Return", TikTok’s overseas version of Tiktok, to some extent, played the role of "Mr. Key".
In the prospectus released earlier, Warner Music specifically mentioned the unique opportunities TikTok brought to the music industry, saying that the new digital scale platform can bring advantages and help to the music entertainment industry, providing incremental music services to "diversified young users", creating new music stars, short videos based on music, etc., which are becoming more and more popular on various social media.
In fact, as early as 2018, Tik Tok reached a cooperation with Warner on music copyright, so now that Warner is listed again, there are many voices speculating whether it is possible for ByteDance and Warner Music to take the opportunity to build more contacts. However, no matter where the relationship between the two parties will go in the capital level, at the business level, the fate of short video and music industry is already inseparable.
Maker of divine comedy
After nearly ten years of delisting, Warner Music finally made a comeback.
As one of the oldest traditional record companies in the world, Warner Music has enjoyed great scenery in the middle and late last century, and its influence has spread all over the world. However, since entering the new century, the company has been frustrated repeatedly and changed owners twice. Although it was successfully listed in 2005, it had to be privatized by Access Industries in 2011 at a price of $8.25 per share (a total of about $3.3 billion) because of its poor performance.
The twists and turns of Warner Music are undoubtedly influenced by the rapid development of the Internet after 2000. The rise of digital music and the weak copyright awareness of the audience made piracy once rampant, and the world’s major physical record markets began to shrink. Many established record companies, including Warner Music and Sony, suffered losses for years.
However, this time, it almost "killed" the Internet of record companies, and now it has become the basis for its development. According to the data of Warner Music’s prospectus, the company’s operating income rose from 2.966 billion US dollars to 4.475 billion US dollars in fiscal year 2015-2019, of which the revenue of digital music sector in fiscal year 2019 reached 2.343 billion US dollars, an increase of 16% compared with fiscal year 2018, accounting for 2018.
Behind the rapid growth of digital music business of music companies, the contribution of short video platform can not be underestimated.
In addition to paying the music company a high copyright fee when using the music library, the biggest function of the short video platform is actually "music with goods". Before 2018, Warner Music’s "Fitz the Tantrums" had never been commercially promoted in Asia, but its song "Hand Clap" was used as BGM by a Korean dance company and became popular on TikTok, which quickly made it famous internationally, and the song also topped the international pop charts in six major music markets around the world.
With this kind of "unintentional", Warner Music naturally pays more attention to the promotion work on TikTok. Arisha A Yadea, senior vice president in charge of digital marketing, revealed that Warner Music launched a series of promotional activities in 2019 and achieved success. The popularity of Disturbed’s song "Hold on to Memories" increased sharply in TikTok, and the number of short videos created for BGM increased by 100 times.
In fact, not only Warner Music, but also many overseas music companies and musicians have felt the charm of short video platforms in recent years. According to Billboard, an American music magazine, the executives of RCA Records Company promptly followed up the official version of the new songs after discovering that their artists’ songs became popular in TikTok, and then even released new versions of many old songs according to the preferences of TikTok users.
In another report of Billboard in 2019, it was mentioned that the rapper Sueco the Child became popular on TikTok because of the popular song Fast, which was used as BGM by 2.7 million TikTok videos in a short period of time, and also won more than 7 million plays on Spotify, an overseas music platform, and Sueco was favored by Atlantic Records and won a paper contract.
Regarding this trend, Billboard revealed that,Now many record companies and music creators try to analyze how to make these songs popular through TikTok at the birth stage of a song.
Compared with European and American music practitioners, China musicians and companies feel the charm of short video platforms earlier.
In 2017, "Divine Comedy" and "We Are Different" became popular in Aauto Quicker with the help of various secondary creations, and even went all the way to Southeast Asia. The number of MV broadcasts on the Internet exceeded 100 million; "Take You to Travel" appeared in many "Tik Tok Love Stories" as BGM, and then ranked fourth in the 2017 Netease Cloud Music Hot List; "Tencent Entertainment White Paper 2017" shows that in the TOP10 online songs in 2017, half of the songs became popular through short video transmission …
Source: Tencent Entertainment White Paper 2017
In the following two years, from "Mimeowing Cats" to "Desert Camel", from "Ear Seed" to "Teenager", the hot songs on Aauto Quicker and Tik Tok became the most magical existence on the Internet.
Many old songs have even turned red under the drive of two platforms, such as "On Earth" sung by Wang Jianfang in 2014, which became one of the hottest songs in Aauto Quicker in 2017; "Panama", which was created in 2013, became popular because the clip was intercepted as "C-mile C-mile Dance", and the Baidu index soared. Miriam Yeung’s "First Kiss" and other old Cantonese songs first became popular on the short video platform, and then triggered a second creative craze.
For musicians and companies, the popularity of songs on platforms such as TikTok is definitely not limited to the short video field. Because short video content is easier to spread on social platforms, many authoritative views believe that the appearance of popular short video content is easier to help music content spread to different platforms, and then gain more "willingness to pay" and audiences outside the circle-This is not only applicable to online songs, but also to traditional music content.
According to this logic, many domestic stars, music companies and short video platforms have reached cooperation, which actually takes a fancy to the user breadth and "circle expansion ability" of these platforms.
Take Jay Chou and Jewell Music holding hands with Aauto Quicker as an example. In the outside world’s cognition, it seems that Aauto Quicker wants to expand the influence of the platform and attract new users by taking advantage of the momentum of the king of heaven. Recently, many fans in Jay Chou have said that they have registered Aauto Quicker for Jay Chou; On the other hand, the degree of overlap between Aauto Quicker fans and Jay Chou fans is not so high, which also means that Jay Chou can use the platform to reach out to more young users.
"The increase of Jay Chou’s fans is not too fast compared with his coffee spot." A person close to Aauto Quicker revealed to Poison Eyes that the first video released by Jay Chou on Aauto Quicker broke 40 million in three hours, but at that time its total number of fans was only 2.6 million, and it took a week to break 10 million."This is good data among stars, but it is not high compared with the number of fans in Jay Chou, which is lower than many people’s initial expectations."
This conclusion is not surprising.
Tencent Music Entertainment Group conducted a user survey on the four platforms of the whole network in Q1, 2019. The results show that Jay Chou is the most popular singer among users from the post-60s to the post-90s, but the post-00s group prefers Joker Xue. According to the statistics of Ai Media Data Center, as of Q3 2019, the proportion of young users under the age of 24 in Aauto Quicker is close to 48%, which explains why the enthusiasm of Aauto Quicker users for Jay Chou is not as high as expected. In addition, it is worth mentioning that Joker Xue, who is deeply loved by the post-00 generation, is the most popular male artist in Tik Tok.
Source: Tencent Music Entertainment Group
From this point of view, no matter what the real reason and purpose of the cooperation between Aauto Quicker and Jewell Music is, Aauto Quicker has the opportunity to attract the attention of more users who love Jay Chou; For Jay Chou, with the spread and channel advantages of short video platform, it can also expand its influence among "diversified young users" as stated in Warner Music’s prospectus.
As a result, this is likely to be a win-win cooperation.
Aauto Quicker and Tik Tok are more than divine comedy.
In the face of huge music traffic, short video platforms are obviously not willing to be only one channel.
As more and more musicians and companies pay attention to the short video platform, it seems to be a natural thing to support the platform’s own original music. On January 19, 2018, Tik Tok officially launched the original music function; Six days later, on January 25th, Tik Tok launched the "Seeing" music program to support original musicians, which was the first time that Tik Tok supported original musicians.
In the middle of the same year, Aauto Quicker launched the "Musician Plan" and announced that it would give musicians a real share of money. Aauto Quicker’s "musician" certification threshold is not high, the official said that as long as the creator has published an original work in Aauto Quicker, he can become an officially certified musician.
The investment in the head platform has indeed returned gratifying results.
Tik Tok’s "Seeing Music in 2018" project has attracted 14,000 musicians to participate in it in one year, and received more than 80,000 original music works, which has inspired 150 million users to shoot videos with related music and helped tens of thousands of Tik Tok musicians to promote new works. It was in this year that the modern brothers who had been in the army for four years became famous with the help of Tik Tok, and then they had the opportunity to board various variety shows such as Everyday, Golden Melody Fishing and so on.
The tilt of the platform in terms of traffic and resources has also pushed singers to focus on the short video platform from another dimension, and more and more Chinese singers have begun to choose the short video platform as a publicity channel. After 2018, Wu Yifan, Lu Han, Tiger Hu, Guo Caijie and other singers have successively publicized and released new songs in Aauto Quicker or Tik Tok, and Wang Leehom even chose Tik Tok as the exclusive launching platform of the single "Nanjing, Nanjing".
For this reason, after entering 2019, the competition in the field of music between Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker will become increasingly fierce.
First, the two sides chose to overweight their respective musicians’ support plans. Tik Tok announced the "Seeing Music Plan in 2019" in January, adding interactive rules of cover, and customizing the creative content for music in the form of semi-proposition; In the same year, Aauto Quicker announced that it would jointly launch the "2019 Music Wildfire Plan" with QQ Music, Cool Dog Music, Cool Me Music and National K Songs to support musicians from the aspects of traffic, promotion and realization.
"2019 Music Primordial Plan" site
"TikTok itself is not a music promotion product, but in the process of users creating and spreading short videos, it has a very significant impact on the promotion of music." In 2019, the person in charge of ByteDance Music Cooperation told Bloomberg Businessweek that in overseas markets, TikTok has also launched plans to support independent musicians in Japan and South Korea, and intends to cooperate with record companies around the world to promote distribution.
Another battlefield is the struggle for copyright. For the growing short video platform, it is obviously not enough to rely solely on the song supply of its original musicians. If we lose the right to use part of the trump card copyright, the short video platform is equivalent to cooking without rice. Therefore, the competition between Tik Tok and Aauto Quicker for the copyright owner of the head is becoming more and more fierce.
According to media reports, Aauto Quicker and Tencent Music Entertainment Group have reached an in-depth cooperation in copyright. Tencent’s 35 million genuine songs have not only been docked with Aauto Quicker and entered its BGM music library, but also Aauto Quicker’s Aauto Quicker Extreme Edition, Station A, Fast Shadow and Sweet Camera can be used. At the same time, according to 36kr news, Tik Tok and Tencent Music Entertainment Group have reached a music licensing cooperation at the end of 2019.
In such a competitive situation, Jay Chou holding hands with Aauto Quicker may just be the beginning of deep cooperation between top singers and short video platforms. According to Poison Eye, although in the evaluation of short video platform, there are few legendary top singers like Jay Chou in the whole industry, on the whole, the platform will continue to introduce some influential top singers and launch more in-depth music project cooperation.
In the near future, there is still much room for imagination in the music business on short video platforms, such as online Live.
The impact of the epidemic has accelerated the development of online performances, and also enabled the short video platform to open up the chain from music announcement, interaction to online performances. By the end of April, Tik Tok had hosted more than 80 live DOULive broadcasts, in which singers such as Greeny, Wilber Pan, Ar Fi and ELLA participated. Aauto Quicker also co-planned several online concerts with UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and National Centre for the Performing Arts.
In the eyes of many insiders, short video has become an indispensable position in the music industry. On the one hand, users have the opportunity to deeply participate in the process of song consumption, resulting in a large number of secondary creative content including cover, gesture dance, dance, performance and so on; On the other hand, the platform also helps the original songs to be strongly exposed, and to some extent alleviates the situation that the online hot songs "songs are not hot".
In addition, the short video platform has reconstructed the whole music ecology, a large number of music companies have risen, and various online hot songs have emerged one after another. Now, there have been many companies that specialize in making divine comedy for the two platforms.
The music story among content companies, musicians, broadcast platforms and short video platforms may just begin.
References:
Tiktok is rewriting how hits get made Source: Billboard
