Picture source @Visual China
text | Deep Pupil Music, author | Hema Jun, editor | Chu Qingzhou
Recently, the controversy surrounding Jay Chou's new song "Christmas Star" has not dissipated. Some people say that Jay Chou has lost his level; some fans insist It is said that Jay Chou still retains the top creative ability in the Chinese music industry in the past 20 years.
The bullets can fly for a while longer, but there is a problem that the entire Chinese music scene has been worrying about for a long time:
Jay Chou has been lying flat in these years. The big reason is the incompetence of Houlang, Jay Chou, Wu Bai, Mayday...the older generation of kings have always been In the state of "no meal replacements on the entire network", the top streamers in the streaming media era cannot give them any sense of urgency in music, so they can relax, play around, and not sing seriously (disclaimer: I did not say lip-syncing) ). In the final analysis,
is still a problem on the production side. Of course there is a "decentralization" factor, but if the past 10 to 15 years can be counted as an era, then this era is indeed bleak, so much so that the entire pop music is constantly trying to "memory kill", from the ruins of the record industry Explore resources.
Especially recently, when the "consumer end" of music suddenly experienced rapid growth, the platter parties of major TV stations and the booming music festivals in various places, it is obvious that they don't know how to organize a decent cast without old faces as the main force. Not quite normal.
The intergenerational gap in Chinese music should be explained as the talent training system in the streaming media era has not yet been established, and the music development capabilities have not met the needs of the times. The problem of
is very clear, but how to solve it? An interesting phenomenon is that new platforms seem to be exploring new methods that need to be verified.
History of popular music , The "forward movement" of the music production center History
If we extend the timeline, we will see a phenomenon: In history, the production center of music is constantly moving towards the consumer side .
In the classical period, academics cultivated talents and "produced" music. At this time, the commodity attributes of music were not yet complete, the production system was almost closed, and listeners did not have much choice. As industry elites, musicians not only produced music, but also Judging music and leading the entire production end.
In the next stage, with the rise of the record industry and popular music, the academic school still provided talents and basic theoretical guidance for the record industry, but the center of music production as a commodity gradually "moved forward" to dominate copyright transactions and record production. As a "music manufacturer", the record industry system selects talents and products that meet its own needs, packages them and then puts them on the market. This is the era that the post-70s and post-80s are familiar with. Once the packaged kings and queens offend large record companies, they will also There is no way to escape the fate of being "hidden in the snow".
Then, when streaming media emerged, the record industry production system gradually collapsed under the impact of new technologies such as electronic copyright and mobile Internet. People have not actually established a production system to replace it.
But we can still observe a significant trend: the channel’s voice continues to increase.
From "Super Girl", "The Voice of China" and "Super Avenue of Stars" to "Produce 101" and "Youth with You" in the talent show 2.0 era and today's various music variety shows, these programs do not produce musical talents, they are just porters of talents. , but they contributed a large number of familiar faces in the music scene and made a large number of popular music.
On the other hand, music apps actually play the role of channel providers.
In the battle for music copyright between Tencent and NetEase, original musicians may be the biggest beneficiaries. The "wild singers" who were originally looking for talent found that their songs were valuable, and several million was not an exaggerated number.
is still the era when channels are king, but the core is a little different. The production side of music continues to move closer to the consumption side, and more "amateur" musicians are "directly connected" to listeners through the Internet, entering the core area of the music world in a shorter way.
From the back-end production in the classical era to the "front shop and back factory" in the record era, the production center of pop music in the streaming media era continues to move forward, which of course has advantages and disadvantages.
After the audience gained a greater say, the value standard of pop music itself gradually blurred, and after parting ways with academic music, it further lost its own value anchor.
At the same time, music creation can respond to the opinions of the market and consumer subjects more quickly, and both becoming popular and overturning can be accomplished in an instant. This is the era of streaming media: high-speed, efficient, and full of excitement.
In the short video era, can you really "see" music?
But even so, when Douyin launched the "See Music" plan in 2018, there were still not many people who were optimistic about it.
More people still think that this is a harmless attempt to support some songs through overflow traffic. On the one hand, it can help Douyin get rid of its status as a "popular BGM producer" and become more popular. The industry moved a little further upstream; on the other hand, Douyin was having a headache at the time with the problem of traffic monetization. If you have dates but no dates, try three poles. What if music is easy to monetize?
The same situation occurs in Kuaishou and Bilibili. A few years later, the
b website re-increased the weight of the music area and launched the "New Generation Musicians Plan" and other initiatives. Kuaishou has just announced that it will launch a new incentive plan in 2024 and will join forces with various music content parties through the "π" plan. Create hit songs. There are still many voices in the industry waiting to see the effects of these support plans.
(Bilibili "College Students Who Love Singing")
I'm not sure whether the ideas of the platforms are similar, but at least their actions do seem similar - using their own traffic to support music creators, through community discussions, and videos Content combination and other means increase music exposure, and eventually gather a group of qualified music producers to control the upstream of music production.
We may also regard this trend as , the final form of the music production side moving forward. It directly enters the vast ocean of consumers, and the production and consumption ends overlap in position.
As far as personal interest is concerned, I am not interested in short video clips. But judging from the data, I still respect the exploration of video platforms.
In 2023, five years after the launch of the "See Music" program, Douyin gave a set of data: This year, 15,715 musicians participated in the program with 30,000+ pieces of music, and the total number of participating song videos was played up to 52 billion times. .
The data I am more concerned about is that Douyin publishes an average of 120 million music-related content every day, and the average daily music content is played 180 billion times. It is gradually getting rid of the fragmented state of repeated fragments in BGM. Douyin users’ music listening The duration increased by 20% in 2023, and functions such as "one-click jump" allow more users to "listen to the entire song."
You can understand this way: A huge "production-dissemination-sales" system has actually been aggregated on short video platform . Who can say that this will not be the core position of music production in the future?
From the perspective of music quality, the music creations of Douyin Kuaishou B station are still a long way from the next Jay Chou, but sometimes, the quantity itself is full of meaning.
may be a bit like the early starting point. Traditional literature enthusiasts initially sneered at the quality of online articles, saying "the writing is all rubbish." However, after a lot of trial and error, platinum writers were piled up, and the quantitative changes gradually began to produce qualitative changes. Today, online articles have become ecologically closed "living literature", and even academic research cannot ignore its existence and vitality.
In an era where everyone can be an up owner, the platform no longer needs to actively search for music talents, but attracts creators through traffic/cash incentives. The path of music production-distribution-consumption is shortened to the limit, and the platform's operation mode has changed from From "I'll go to the mountain and come to me" to "The mountain will come to me and come to me", this is an opportunity that the times have brought to the short video platform.
Quality still requires a long period of exploration and reconstruction
For example, the main content of the "Seeing Music" plan is to first provide traffic support for the music content released by Douyin. After the initial screening of big data, select some of them with complete creations. It provides publishing technical support in the professional field of music and cultivates a new generation of musicians with "short video marks".
It seems that this design closed loop is smooth. As we all know, Douyin already has the ability to link the complete music industry chain in terms of "hardware".
has corresponding resources or partners in various aspects such as content production (Sponge Band), music promotion (Hot Galaxy), copyright agency (Galaxy Ark), music streaming (soda music), and live music. The
data seems to be okay. The music expert Su Xingjie discovered in the first season, "The Wind Blows Over Eight Thousand Miles" has accumulated more than 2 billion views on the entire network.
Of course, the quality of streaming music is a more complex system project.
The current question in the market is that after the massive amount of music content is generated, can Douyin and Kuaishou successfully complete the road from quantitative change to qualitative change and achieve high-quality and professional music creation?
It should be said that what short video platforms are doing is not only exploring and establishing new music production models, but also building new industry barriers for music production.
Once the market gets used to discovering new generation music works from short videos, musical talents and excellent works will become "accompanying mines" of traffic .
In this way, creators will naturally gather in the traffic pool, and a moat of a large platform will naturally form. The whole model is a bit like the metals gallium and germanium that China restricts exports. They are not rare in themselves, but they are mainly obtained through the electrolytic aluminum industry. The complete electrolytic aluminum production system has become a production barrier for gallium and germanium, and a production system has been established solely for gallium. It’s not impossible, it’s just that the business cost is too high and it cannot gain a foothold in the market.
In an environment where short videos are king, music as an “accompanying mine” has a bright future. However, at least from the current point of view, creative professionalism and ideological depth are thresholds that Douyin Kuaishou B station has not yet crossed. When original high-quality music that truly belongs to the short video platform will appear, it still requires a long exploration.
In the long run, what channels need to do is "discover" rather than "cultivate".
In fact, the TV talent shows we are familiar with do not "produce music" per se, but "transport" people and works to the public eye.
For example, Zhou Shen and Shan Yichun, who are popular in "The Voice of China", are actually He is from a major in the professional system. In other types of drafts, the ones who stand out are either self-taught Mao Buyi or trainees trained by Benyou Entertainment Company.
For short video platforms, channels are also its own comfort zone - based on traffic, using music as a "value-added business" in the natural selection of consumers and traffic cycles is not only low-cost, but also more efficient. Comfort - Of course, the platform has its own genes. Dikkuai's huge amount of data and Bilibili's in-depth secondary innovation may be the key to unlocking high-quality creations.
As for how to achieve the goal, of course the big manufacturers still need to show their talents and overcome obstacles.
