Source: 36氪
Text / Wei Xiaoning
Editor / Qiao Qian
At 12:00 noon today, Taylor Swift’s tenth studio album “Midnights” will be officially released, and the digital album is priced at 35 yuan.
It’s Swift’s second release following the 2020 release of “folklore” and sister album “evermore,” which earned her her third Grammy for Album of the Year.
The Chinese owner Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME) is very face-saving and supports it as always. The pre-sale of the album started 48 hours in advance, and the opening advertisement of QQ Music lasted for 24 hours. There are no shortage of video greetings, customized electronic handwritten letters, and album nameplate numbers for Chinese fans.
As of press time, the pre-sale of “Midnights” on QQ Music has reached nearly 90,000, with sales of nearly 3 million yuan, higher than other music platforms. Of course, this other platform mainly refers to NetEase Cloud Music, and the pre-sale volume is close to 80,000.
Support is deserved. Taylor Swift’s company Universal Music, Tencent affiliate holds a 20% stake in it. In 2021, Universal Music’s stock price soared when it listed in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, bringing in nearly 8 billion yuan in revenue for Tencent in the short term.
But luck failed to return to the domestic market. On October 21, it happened to be one month after Tencent Music returned to Hong Kong from the US stock market. TME closed yesterday at HK$15.12 per share, with a total market value of HK$51.894 billion; while it was HK$18.22 a month ago, with a market value of HK$62.534 billion.
The most expensive digital album in history at 35 yuan, the pre-sale in China is nearly 6 million yuan
“Midnight, a story about 13 sleepless nights. Stories scattered throughout my life, will be released October 21. Meet me at midnight.”
On the Weibo homepage, Taylor Swift’s top Weibo has nearly 9,000 retweets and 60,000 likes so far. She is one of the few European and American artists with more than 10 million followers on Weibo in China, and her interaction volume is top-notch in China.
Taylor Swift pinned on WeiboThe new album looks good. 13 tracks, ace producer Jack Antonoff once again helped out, including the first collaboration song “Snow on the Beach” with “Sister Thunder” Lana Del Rey. The blue-purple theme on the cover makes people look forward to what the singer, who has been around for nearly 15 years and has a long creative life, will try again after winning the Grammys with three different music styles: folk, pop and alternative.
“If (selling) 25, it will definitely double.” Some fans commented that Taylor Swift’s new album sold 100,000 copies in 7 hours.
As a unique product of China’s music streaming market, digital albums, 35 yuan, may have broken market records. Earlier in July, Jay Chou’s “The Greatest Work” was priced at 30 yuan, and the old fans were complaining and paying for their feelings.
As early as July, the music vertical media “Music Pioneer” had predicted that domestic Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music would increase their prices: in the context of high copyright costs and depleted mobile Internet user dividends, music platforms generally face revenue. predicament. Spotify took the lead in raising prices, and Apple Music and Amazon Music have also raised the price of subscription fees this year.
QQ Music is actually adding services with higher price tiers. In February this year, QQ Music launched a “super member”, which includes more than 50 rights and interests, 40 yuan per month and 348 yuan per year, while the previous luxury green diamond was only 18 yuan.
Of course, the high price of Taylor Swift’s new album may not be entirely determined by Tencent Music.
“One of the things that’s unique about music streaming is that we think it’s the lowest-cost, high-value form of entertainment you can find… Given that inflation in the wider economy is running at a high single-digit rate, We think the music streaming platform will likely decide to raise some pricing in the future,” Universal Music shareholder Ryan Israel told its investors.
“The price increase of music streaming media is not only a matter of internal and external difficulties, but even a little bit of hope for the copyright owner.” “Music Pioneer” commented.
Despite the price increase, Taylor Swift’s influence in the Chinese market cannot be underestimated. During the epidemic, with zero announcements and only half a year apart, her first two albums sold more than 9 million and 5 million copies respectively on the QQ music platform, while Jay Chou’s latest album achieved nearly 6 million copies.
If calculated based on the final sale of 5 million albums, at a unit price of 35 yuan, “Midnights” will bring Tencent Music nearly 200 million yuan in sales.
How Tencent Music Goes Through “midnight”
At the publicity level, the parent company’s investment in Universal Music has brought a lot of convenience to Tencent Music.
In August 2019, Vivendi SE announced that Tencent Holdings was negotiating to acquire a 10% stake in Universal Music, a subsidiary of Vivendi. It was in this month that Taylor Swift’s seventh studio album “Lover” was launched, and for the first time interacted with fans in the comment area of China’s music platform, QQ Music.
Interactive pageThree months after the release of “Lover”, while Taylor Swift came to China to attend the Double Eleven party, Tencent Music even invited her to Guangzhou to hold a fan meeting. “Tencent Music Entertainment Festival” also invited Taylor Swift to sing in the form of online VCR.
In September of this year, one year after the successful IPO of Universal Music in Europe, Tencent Music, a subsidiary of Tencent, returned to Hong Kong to list. After going public in the United States in 2018, Tencent Music’s stock price fell by about 31%, and its market value shrank. to $8 billion.
Although entering the “U.S. stock pre-delisting list” is due to the international environment, the development situation can still be seen from the information in the prospectus: from 2019 to 2021, although the income level has increased from 25.4 billion yuan to 31.2 billion yuan, but the net profit From 4 billion yuan to 3.2 billion yuan.
“The company is facing fierce competition from other online music platforms and providers of new content formats (such as audio and short videos), which will put pressure on the short-term growth of the company’s overall user scale and realization of social entertainment services.” Tencent Music Prospectus show.
As the world‘s only profitable streaming media platform, and in China with a huge mobile Internet user base, Tencent Music, after standing at the top with copyright means to kill everything and cover everything, is feeling the harshest wind at this moment: Copyright does not It means everything. The domestic pop music market evaluation ecosystem cannot withstand the flood of short video platforms. Audience attention continues to be grabbed, and music streaming platforms are clearly on the decline.
In terms of data, in the past three years, the monthly active users of Tencent Music’s online music service have decreased by 60 million. Analysys’ “Annual Comprehensive Analysis of China’s Online Music Market 2022” shows that in January 2022, the average daily usage time of all mobile music users was 21 minutes, a year-on-year decrease of 21%. In 2017, before the Xiami Music APP was shut down, it was still the music platform with the highest daily usage time per capita, exceeding 34 minutes.
QuestMobile’s “2022 China Mobile Internet Semi-Annual Report” pointed out that as of June 2022, short video users accounted for nearly 30% of the total time spent in the Internet industry, and most of them were users of Douyin and Kuaishou watching live broadcasts.
Perhaps, only when Taylor Swift, a pop superstar of the magnitude, releases a new album, Tencent Music will have the opportunity to announce to the market again: it is still the platform with the most complete copyrights for domestic audio sources, although it has the same power as Sony, Warner, and Universal’s three major record companies. The exclusive copyright strategic cooperation is no longer, but the relationship is still the closest, and the old love is still there.
Although with the strict control of the market supervision system, the concentration of this old love has become lower and lower: in late July 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation required Tencent Music to lift the exclusive agreement with upstream copyright owners. On August 31, Tencent Music announced that it would give up exclusive copyright authorization, and upstream copyright owners can authorize other operators on their own.
Previously, Tencent Music had more than 200 domestic and foreign copyright partners, with a music library of more than 20 million songs. In 2018, the Jay Chou copyright case with NetEase Cloud Music was well known, and finally won the case, becoming the strongest proof that Tencent Music has always suppressed NetEase Cloud Music.
But the biggest enemy is no longer here, nor in byte beating, but in the entire era of eyeballs counted in “seconds”.
Tencent Music is already working hard to break out of the siege in its own way: in 2020, “TME Live” was launched, and more than 100 online performances and concert re-screenings were held in total. Collaborating singers include Jay Chou, Mayday, Lin Junjie, Wu Qingfeng, West Side Boys, etc. The dynamic video is directly posted on the WeChat Moments page, and the circle is not broken.
But where is the new power of the Chinese music scene, is it really Douyin? Sitting opposite is a short video. When the sentiment cards and copyright cards are exhausted, what new cards can Tencent Music come up with?
In the opening advertisement, Taylor Swift is good at guarding the flickering flames, which is like a symbol and a kind of torture.