Author |Punpeng Editor |Fan Zhihui
Recently, "2023 Tencent Entertainment*** hereinafter referred to as "** release. Among them, the first outline reviews the development of the Chinese music scene in the past year.
This year, the number of network users reached 72.6 billion, nearly 7 percent of Internet users have been inseparable from the Internet** as a pastime. Tencent Entertainment Group's service revenue surpassed that of social entertainment services for the first time, and the number of paid membership users officially exceeded 100 million, reaching 10.3 billion. Both the user penetration rate of the network and the scale of paying users are steadily improving.
At the same time, the performance market has recovered strongly, not only the concerts of new and old singers have hit strongly, but also 169 new ** festival IPs have been born, and the total box office performance has achieved leapfrog growth. In contrast, the music variety shows quite fatigue, looking at the ** variety show, it is still the world of the competition system and the N generation of variety.
* The industry caught the express train of AIGC, and AI Yanzi Sun was invincible all over Station B, but the platform side entered the game one after another, staking ground;After the savage growth of short ** hot songs into the refined production stage, "black plum sauce", "let this rain all fall" and other record industry "regular army" swept the whole network, shoddy, crazy new, with the number of hot songs gradually defeated.
We also saw that Daolang made a strong comeback with "Rakshasa Sea City", and the association of revenge Shuangwen created this year's phenomenal single in one fell swoop;Wu Bai and Tao Zhe borrowed stalks to get out of the circle, and this year's netizens did not stop archaeology, made stalks, and carnivals.
When you open this article, 2023 is about to come to an end, and we have taken stock of the top ten keywords of the year and looked back at the year of the Chinese music scene.
On August 15 this year, Tencent** Entertainment Group released its second-quarter financial report. According to the financial report, ** service revenue increased by 47% year-on-year6% to 42500 million yuan, and the revenue contribution of ** service reached 583%, surpassing social entertainment services for the first time.
Five years ago, the social entertainment business accounted for more than 70% of Tencent's total revenue and helped it become the world's first profitable platform. In contrast, at that time had 3Spotify, with 500 million users and a 45% paid rate, is far from doing so (and now occasionally making quarterly profits).
In June this year, the number of paying users of Tencent Entertainment Group exceeded 100 million, and at the same time, the payment rate rose to a record high, and the average monthly revenue of a single paying user increased for five consecutive quarters, reaching RMB 9 in the current quarter$7.
According to Tencent** Entertainment Group's financial report for the third quarter of 2023, subscription revenue increased by 42% year-on-year0%, driving *** service revenue increased by 32% year-on-year7% to 45500 million yuan, accounting for nearly 70% of the total revenue.
Not only Tencent**, for the entire market, this data is of milestone significance.
On the one hand, this means that more and more users are willing to pay for high-quality content, and promote the paid education of the market to enter a new stageOn the other hand, it also means that the competition situation of major ** platforms is further intensified, and it is necessary to find more benign ** copyright monetization channels, and fight more difficult to improve user experience, high-quality ** content and services, and even platform commercialization.
However, behind the steady increase in the number of subscribers, there is also a hidden crisis. When the control of the live broadcast business becomes more and more stringent, and short-term platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou are gradually making efforts in karaoke and live broadcast to compete for user time, it is extremely critical for Tencent Entertainment Group and NetEase Cloud to continue to find more diversified business drivers.
After the epidemic was released, the performance market, which had been silent for three years, showed a blowout trend.
Looking back at the two major holidays this year, during the May Day period, there were 41 ** festivals across the country, involving 19 provinces. During the National Day holiday, there were more than 60 festivals, setting a new record. Originated in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, more than ten years of the first section continued to spread outward, to this day, the first node root system has spread to many counties, and then take root, sprout, blossom and bear fruit.
**" shows that in 2023, the number of ** festivals held in first-tier cities will be 26, and the number of **festivals held in other sub-tier cities will be obvious**, of which the number of ** festivals held in new first-tier cities throughout the year will be 86, which is three times that of first-tier cities;The number of second-tier cities is 61, which is more than twice that of first-tier cities.
At the same time, the lineup of the ** festival aimed at the sinking market should not be underestimated, not only the box office appeal of the ** festival has been continuously improved, but also driven the discussion of online topics, and the popularity ranking is in a leading position.
Take the 2023 Wunvzhou Nebula Green Dry ** Festival as an example, the ** festival is held in Wuyuan County, Shangrao City, Jiangxi Province, and is held by the new ** festival brand in the county, but relying on the appeal of Mao Buyi, Xue Zhiqian, Cui Jian, Zhang Liangying and other finale artists, it has become the most discussed ** festival on the whole network this year.
Behind the sinking of the festival is the driving force of consumption in a short period of time.
Participating in the festival across the city will naturally generate a series of transportation and accommodation costs, and there are also many sales scenes such as catering and surrounding areas at the festival site, coupled with local shopping, sightseeing and other consumption, holding a festival event can often indirectly drive hundreds of millions of yuan in total consumption.
However, the sinking of the first node has also brought a series of new problems.
For example, the homogenization of the ** section lineup, the problem of one side of the thousand sections is becoming more and more serious;**The organizer of the festival has no experience in hosting the event, and there is a lack of infrastructure on site and a poor experienceThe lack of experience in large-scale activities in the city where the festival is held, and problems such as on-site guidance and public security management have also been exposed, and there have been many problems such as scalpers reselling tickets and the loss of tent items in the festival.
What needs to be seen is that the knotting is only a beginning, not an end. Whether it is the organizer or the host city, the next thing we need to think about is how to convert the traffic of the blowout of the first festival into stock, lay a solid IP foundation, and optimize supporting services, so as to usher in a more sustainable prosperity in the future.
Not only the audience, but this year's stars are also holding concerts with "revenge".
According to the statistics of "**", the total number of domestic offline concerts & festivals held in 2023 will be as high as 2,823, contributing 508.9 billion in box office revenue. After 3 years of silence, from the king and queen, the top superstar, to the new generation of popular singers, they all started the tour together, and the opening of N shows has become the "basic exercise in the industry".
Among them, Xue Zhiqian's "Alien Objects" tour has held 60 concerts, and most cities have held two concerts in a row, setting a new record for stadiums in a single year in the mainland market**I want to see you so well The concert has also been added in many places, with six consecutive performances in Beijing Bird's Nest, five consecutive performances in Guangzhou, and eight consecutive performances in Shanghai;Jay Chou's Carnival World Tour also sang 7 times in 10 days in Hong Kong, 4 times in 4 days in Shanghai, and the Fuzhou station, which will start next year, is also a continuation of the ultra-high intensity of 4 days and 4 shows.
High-intensity performances are also difficult to satisfy the audience's enthusiasm for the performance. "*It shows that many celebrity concerts in 2023 are still hard to find, and "grabbing tickets" has become a hot topic of discussion among the public, and the concerts of stars such as Xue Zhiqian, Li Yuchun, and Lin Junjie have all suffered from the difficulty of grabbing tickets. Taking the Hong Kong station of Jay Chou's concert as an example, the singing for 5 days is still unprecedented, not only is there 20,000 people in each venue, but there are also 80,000 people outside the venue to "listen", and even the nearby Ferris wheel has to queue for 2 hours, just to take a look after taking off.
With the enthusiasm of the public to watch the performance remains high, and the stars gather to hold concerts, the performance venues, sound and light and other supporting facilities around the country are very tight, and the "special forces concert" can undoubtedly achieve scale effect and reduce the average cost of each performance.
However, the operation of opening n shows in a row puts forward extremely high requirements for the strength and physical fitness of the best people, so the bodies of stars in this year's concert market have also "turned on the red light" one after another. For example, as soon as Jay Chou's Tianjin concert started, he was unwell and his heart beat fast and interrupted the performance**Ashin, the lead singer of the Xi'an concert, performed while inhaling oxygen.
In addition, although such a performance intensity has created a prosperous scene in the performance market, it has also brought to the surface problems such as "pillar tickets", "wall root tickets", the proliferation of scalpers, and the unreasonable refund mechanism.
Grasping the recovery of the offline performance market, cultural and tourism departments around the country have stepped down one after another, seized the opportunity of the festival, and actively supported the development of the first festival. Among them, Shijiazhuang is undoubtedly the most advanced city.
On July 13th, Shijiazhuang City officially announced that it would hold the "Rock Home Town" performance season to build China's "Rock City" in an all-round way. In the end, the construction of the Rock City is divided into three parts, one is to hold the "Passionate Summer Night" rock performance event on the weekend, the second is to vigorously build the Rock City performing arts position, and the third is to launch flash mob rock performances on the subway and bus.
In fact, as early as 2022, Hebei Network Radio and Television Station** published an article saying that "rock" and "stone" are the same word in English. Shijiazhuang - rock (stone rock) home (home) town (Zhuang), English meaning can be translated as "stone rock hometown". Regardless of reality or providence, Shijiazhuang is a veritable "rock city".
A year later, the interpretation of "Rock Home Town" was also officially recognized. But in many **people and ** people, "rock" is the "past" that belongs to Shijiazhuang.
Before Shijiazhuang determined the positioning of "Rock City", "I Love Rock and Roll" had been suspended for ten years, and "Popular Songs" had been suspended for five years. The city of rock 'n' roll, which started almost from scratch, is destined to be accompanied by all kinds of uncertainties at all times.
Soon after the official announcement, the adapted song "The Shijiazhuang People Who Can't Be Killed" became popular on the Internet, and netizens didn't buy it, "Awesome, my Zhuang", and called the embarrassing barrage all over the screen.
On July 24, during the performance of the violent champagne band at the Brown Sugar Livehouse, musician Ding Xiaolong's behavior of taking off his pants in public was finally characterized as "endangering social morality". The local brown sugar livehouse involved in the incident was ordered to immediately suspend business for rectification, and was given a warning and a fine of 200,000 yuan in accordance with the law, and Ding Xiaolong was also administratively detained.
It wasn't until the beginning of September that Shijiazhuang held its first large-scale performance, the Rock Home Town Original ** Festival. The performance is free, but you need to make an appointment to grab tickets, and the 14,000 tickets originally released by the official were collapsed several times due to the large number of ticket grabbers.
However, after the controversy, Shijiazhuang is slowly becoming formal. According to statistics, as of October, the "Rock City" season has attracted 1 million music fans.
Perhaps because offline concerts and festivals have inherited the public's enthusiasm for performances, the online music comprehensive market has shown an overall fatigue.
In 2023, the total number of brands absorbed by variety shows will be the lowest in the past three years, and the ability of variety shows to attract investment will decline overall.
This year, the total number of brands absorbed by the top 50 variety shows in the popularity index is only 369, a decrease of 13 compared with 425 in 202218%。Due to the significant reduction in the amount of advertising funds in program production, the conservative investment strategy has made resources continue to pour into the N generation of variety, and the number of new variety shows at the head of the four major brands has decreased significantly.
According to "** statistics, among the top 10 popular variety shows in 2023, the music variety occupies nine seats, but among the nine seats are "Riding the Wind 2023", "This!".is the sixth season of hip-hop", "China Rap Peak Showdown 2023", "The Band's Summer Season 3" and other 6 belong to the comprehensive N generation. Only the stage survival experimental variety show "Stage 2023" has achieved a small-scale breakthrough with its novel competition mode, while "College Students Who Love to Sing", which has just started, still needs time to accumulate voice.
After the 2021 draft variety show was terminated by the "Qinglang Action", many music variety production platforms have not yet found a new track, and can only continue to tap the residual value of the existing IP in their hands. iQIYI still clings to the two major verticals of rap and band, but its appeal will inevitably decline;Youku is the only one left in the variety show market that has made the sixth season of "This is Hip-hop";Mango TV relied on "Sister Lang", "Brother Phi" and "The Sound of Life" to bring together a wave of attention, but without exception, they are all comprehensive N generation.
While the commercial value and discussion continue to be hot, the innovation of the music variety is far from enough, and the variety shows that can set off the topic this year are all competition systems, and the highlight is nothing more than the excitement and tension brought by elimination. The slow variety show "Time** Club", which previously focused on warmth and **, came to the third season of "Time ** Club - Friends" this year, but the word of mouth also plummeted, and was called "embarrassing" by netizens.
However, 2024 is coming, and various ** platforms are also releasing signals in variety show production. There are drafts that go to sea, there are also group talent shows, and there are scandalous star desert island reality shows that are well versed in traffic passwords.
But in any case, how to innovate will become a proposition that needs to be considered for a long time.
Keyword six: Rakshasa Sea City
Interpretation of ancient legends and cozy folk tunes, Daolang's "Rakshasa Sea City" ignited ** this summer as soon as it was released, and was called the "First Divine Comedy of 2023".
Rakshasa Haishi interprets the famous chapter in "Strange Tales from Liaozhai", which tells the wonderful journey of a beautiful man named Ma Ji. On the way to the sea to do business, he was coerced by the wind and waves and accidentally entered the Rakshasa country, where the beauty and ugliness are reversed, the ugly are noble, and the beauty is lowly. The original author, Pu Songling, used this to satirize the social phenomenon of not distinguishing between beauty and ugliness and blindly welcoming them.
For a while, the "seeming to refer to" in the song stimulated the curiosity of netizens to spy on the gossip of the music world. In just a few days after its release, the muzzle of the gun turned to several ** people, including Na Ying. Netizens poured into Na Ying's Douyin comment area, and 8 million comments were added, becoming a rather absurd footnote outside of a song.
Subsequently, "Rakshasa Sea City" was regarded as the "Song of Justice" by a group of netizens, and the metaphor behind the lyrics stirred everyone's emotions and made the song continue to extend new meanings. From Peking opera, sentences, two-person turns, and flower drum opera covers in the literary and artistic circles, to sociology, history, and literary analysis, to comments in the fields of justice, education, and international relations, the Internet is very lively, and "Rakshasa Haishi" is regarded as a sharp blade that stabs at the flies and dogs in society.
Rakshasa Sea City is like a hurricane again, setting off a stormy wave of speculation and interpretation on the whole network. But Daolang, who is in the eye of the storm, has always remained silent, and Daolang's agent has said that he will not respond publicly to the song again.
In the dark, it is in line with the gist of "Rakshasa Sea City", true and false, false and real, only left to the world to speak.
Your shallow smile is like a black plum sauce. ”
At the beginning of March this year, "Plum Sauce" swept the short ** platform. This song was written, composed and sung by Li Ronghao, and was included in the ** "Across the Seas" released on December 21, 2022.
The cause of the incident was that music critic Ding Taisheng posted a comment on his personal account**, pointing out that the song refrain has "a strong Chinese local style mixed with the explosive elements of the current short ** platform", mocking this as a "speculative" work, in order to cater to "small town youth", "literary and artistic backbones who graduated from junior high school" and "migrant workers", accusing Li Ronghao of "no sincerity" and "compromising into the dirt for the sake of fire".
In the end, the tone was set, and this "Black Plum Sauce" was unbearable.
Subsequently, Ding Taisheng's words were recognized by many music critics and netizens. The melody of "Plum Sauce" is full of seven points, and it is understandable that it is sung by a little-known Internet singer, but it is sung by Li Ronghao, which does not meet his status in the Chinese music scene and the expectations of fans.
However, from another point of view, perhaps it is this "Plum Sauce" that continues the tone set by "The Lonely Brave", gradually expelling the shoddy and assembly-line production of hot songs from the market, handing over the hot songs to a mature and systematic production team, and improving the quality baseline of hot songs.
This year, hot stalks belonging to the Chinese music scene are still emerging, creating one collective carnival after another of netizens.
The first to come out of the circle was "Thai Pants Spicy", which originated from what the little ghost Wang Linkai said at the concert: "I am a very stubborn person, I never care what others say to me, let me do it." If you can be like me, then I think this thing is so cool!”
Because this "too cool" is too magical, it was jokingly called "Thai pants spicy" by netizens, and it swept the whole network and became a new mouth fetish for many young people.
Not long after, not long ago, the little ghost was commented on by music critic Liang Yuan on the stage of the fourth season of "The Voice of God", and questioned the latter, "Can I stand on the stage and play, teacher, can you?"Once again, he contributed hot stalks to netizens, and the little ghost was also called the "Terrier King of the Year".
Subsequently, Tao Zhe's ancient variety show was improvised by many netizens, and a strange cry of "oh, ah, eh" stunned everyone, making the godfather of R&B an abstract musician on the Internet. Subsequently, netizens improvised this paragraph into his song "Small Town Girl", and the second created a popular BGM that swept Douyin.
Many netizens used this BGM to match their embarrassing moments, and thanked Tao Zhe "Without you, I may never have sent this **".
At the end of the year, Wu Bai, who was busy holding concerts in various places, contributed new stalks to netizens.
Everyone gathered together and ridiculed Wu Bai's performance costumes as "the backlog of clothes sold back then", and ridiculed the concert as "testing the singing level of fans across the country". At the concert site, he pointed to the sky with his hand and began to walk around the stage, and at the end of the three-hour performance, netizens ridiculed him for "not singing a word, WeChat steps 20,000 steps".
In an era when the relationship between celebrities and the public is becoming more and more flattened, it is these meme carnivals that have brought social vitality to many celebrities.
If both official and unofficial releases are counted, then Stefanie Sun must be the person who has released the most singles this year.
Open station B, "AI Yanzi Sun" has become an extraordinarily popular category. From pop songs to Internet hits, and even all kinds of folk operas, "AI Sun Yanzi" is at your fingertips. Unpopular singer Stefanie Sun has finally become a veritable popular singer in the process of AIGC empowering the public.
This year, AIGC is undoubtedly a hot concept across all walks of life. In the Chinese music scene, AIGC is not only a personal carnival for music fans, but also various platforms continue to integrate AIGC technology into their existing product architecture.
For example, NetEase Cloud** has launched the AI ** production platform Xstudio, cooperating with Xiaoice to provide ** creators with AI audio sources that can be used;TME's Galaxy Sound, MUSE, Tianqin Lab and Tencent AI Lab have jointly created TME Studio, an intelligent creation assistant, which integrates a series of AI functions such as separation, MIR calculation, auxiliary lyric writing, and intelligent music scores.
Looking to the future, AIGC technology will penetrate more deeply into the industry, and even become a key force in rewriting the Chinese music scene.
**The lip-synching turmoil of the concert caused the collapse of the youth memories of the whole people.
The incident started with an appraisal released on November 30 by the farmer of the wheat field of the UP of station B. He selected 12 live audios with good sound quality from the Shanghai concert that were recorded and contributed by fans for vocal extraction. According to the software Melodyne, 5 of the 12 songs are pure lip-synchs, and 1 is a mix of true and fake songs.
Subsequently, ** formed a wave of discussion about lip-synching in the whole society. Not only have the topics related to concert lip-synching dominated the hot search for many days, but also received the attention of many mainstream ** such as Xinhua News Agency, CCTV News, and People's **, and the cultural market inspection departments of the places where the concerts were held have been involved in the investigation.
More importantly, the lip-pit singing turmoil of ** has triggered a discussion in the industry about the gray area of "pad sound" and "semi-open microphone". It is understood that the so-called "half-open microphone" and "pad sound" technique came from South Korea earlier, which means that the accompaniment of ** on the stage contains the original song, and the singer opens the microphone, but the voice is a little smaller, and the original song of ** overlaps and is heard by the audience.
However, what is the volume ratio of real singing and pad sound can be defined as lip syncing, and this incident also caused the whole people to think.
More importantly, this turmoil is expected to force China to strengthen industry supervision and make more detailed regulations and policy statements on various lip-syncing issues.
Looking back at the Chinese music scene in 2023, there are mixed blessings.
The good news is that the awareness of user payment has gradually improved, which has made a good start for the future development of the industry, and the scale of the offline performance market is unprecedented, and the shoddy hot songs are going downhill, and the entire industry is returning to quality orientationWhat worries me is that the scalper phenomenon has been repeatedly banned, the performance chaos is frequent, the basic business capabilities such as Quankaimai are touted, and the music comprehensive that has high hopes has fallen into the innovation dilemma and declined.
However, we believe that the industry is always spiraling upwards and moving forward.
2023 is coming to an end, and I'm already starting to miss it.
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