Maybe soon, you will be able to listen to Jay Chou's songs on NetEase Yun Music!

It has been reported recently that with the deepening of antitrust, Tencent's music streaming business may give up exclusive broadcasting rights and will no longer need to sell Kuwo and KuGou music. Sina Technology also learned from people familiar with the matter that Tencent Music will issue an announcement to give up exclusive copyright in the near future.

And with the opening of the copyright market,The copyright empire that Tencent Music worked so hard to build in the past may collapse, and NetEase Yun Music and so on ushered in the opportunity to overtake around the corner.But will all this really benefit the industry?

Zhang Xiaorong, director of the Deep Science and Technology Research Institute, put forward a different point of view. He told Sina Technology that even if Tencent Music liberalizes its exclusive copyright, the online music industry has a small market and a single business model, making it difficult to support multiple competitive platforms. let me put it another way,Under the pattern of all-round competition, some platforms may "die" first.

Tencent Music is still eating alone.

The background of the censorship of Tencent Music is that in April this year, the General Administration of Market Supervision and Administration stepped up efforts to comprehensively crack down on the antitrust behavior of China's Internet giants.Tencent Music is one of the key targets.

As a copyright tycoon of online music, Tencent Music collected the exclusive rights of Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music as early as 2017.

It also affects the healthy development and market competition of the online music market. The copyright advantage of Tencent Music is also like an indefinite time bomb, which may affect its development at some point in the future.

In fact, as early as September 2017, the National copyright Administration stepped in to interview the key leaders of Tencent Music, Ali Music, NetEYun Music and other companies, asking these music companies to cross-license 99% of the copyright.

Within six months, the three giants of Tencent Music, Ali Music and NetEYun Music reached a mutual copyright agreement.

However, Tencent Music holds 90 per cent of the rights in the Chinese music market and has more than 40 million music libraries, and even if it uses 99 per cent of the exclusive rights to communicate with other companies, it can still hold more than 400,000 exclusive copyright songs. This 1% allows Tencent Music to retain the exclusive copyright of well-known artists such as Jay Chou and May Day, so as to grasp the "key tickets".

There have long been views in the industry thatThe core repertoire that is really active in the Chinese music market is only about 30,000.

Therefore, although on the surface, Tencent Music is connected with the copyright music library of NetEase Music and Ali Music, and everyone turns enemies into friends, in fact, the playlists of the latter two users are still turning gray.Tencent Music occupies the core position of the market with the advantage of copyright, and the exclusive copyright moat is still there.

On the issue of copyright of core songs, Ali Music and NetEyun Music have suffered. In November 2019, Tencent Music sued NetEase Music simply because of Jay Chou's music copyright issues, and the court finally ordered NetEase Music to compensate the plaintiff, Tencent Music, for economic losses and reasonable expenses to stop the infringement.

Xiami Music, a subsidiary of Ali Music, was officially shut down in February this year. It is generally believed that the core reason for the shutdown is that it is dragged down by copyright.

Xiami's sad departure is a microcosm of the music copyright dispute. For the industry, the death of small shrimp certainly can not affect the copyright empire built by Tencent, but if Tencent Music does not break through this wall, the survival of other players will become more difficult, and the market competition will become more abnormal.

The industry has never changed for the better.

Reviewing the development history of China's online music market, copyright plays a key role in more than a decade of industrial reform and process, affecting the trend of the industry.

Among them, around 2002-2010, is the entrepreneurial wave of Internet music. During this period, new music products and platforms are launched almost every year.BaiduMP3, Qianqian Jingle, KuGou Music, Kuwi Music, QQ Music, Giant Whale, Xiami Music, Tiantian Beautiful Music, Douban FM, Dom Music and so on have been established.

This period is also the "rough period" of pirated songs flying all over the sky.

Until July 2015, the National copyright Administration issued a notice on ordering online music service providers to stop unauthorized dissemination of music works, ordering all online music service providers to stop unauthorized dissemination of music works, and take all unauthorized music works offline by July 31, 2015.

According to statistics, this time under the strictest copyright order, 16 music service providers offline more than 2.2 million unauthorized music works, and began to explore the charging model.

In the following years, the copyright of online music has been gradually standardized, but at the same time, the royalty fee has gone up, and a number of small and medium-sized platforms that have no money to buy copyright have died one after another.

In the post-copyright era, the problems of music piracy and copyright contention are gradually alleviated.The digital economy is developing vigorously, and the overall ecology of the industry is improving. Especially since Tencent, Alibaba and NetEase carried out 99% cross-licensing of music rights in 2017, the confusion of copyright division has gradually diminished.

However, because Tencent still holds the core exclusive copyright of the head record company, and sits on the top three platforms of monthly active users, occupying most of the market share, several major platforms have been surging for many years, and the market competition has never subsided.

However, this online music copyright competition has not really improved the living conditions of upstream musicians. The "2020 Chinese musicians report" shows that under the background of the country attaching great importance to the development of the cultural industry, although the living environment of musicians in China has improved, the greater reality and challenge is that the copyright income of musicians is meagre. Even most of them have no copyright revenue, the income structure of the whole music industry is out of balance, and the income level is low as a whole.

According to the above "report", 52% of musicians have no music income, 24% of musicians' music income accounts for less than 5% of total income, 7% of musicians' music income accounts for 6-20% of total income, and only 7% of musicians' music income accounts for 100%. The cost of music creation is not proportional to income, resulting in low professional participation of musicians. To a large extent, this also affects the output of high-quality music content in the industry.

In the process of the legalization of the music market, the industry is more likely to show a rise in copyright fees, international record companies and head music platforms have made a lot of money, but the real content producers have made little profit.

And this antitrust investigation, to a certain extent, will better regulate the market and promote healthy competition in the field of music copyright, and musicians are expected to usher in new hopes.

Can the old opponent "turn around"?

If Tencent Music gives up the exclusive copyright this time, will the second echelon players such as NetEase Cloud Music usher in the opportunity of overtaking?

First of all, NetEase Yun Music and Xiami Music once started with niche and differentiation, relying on word-of-mouth, but copyright kidnapped users, users can only choose music products according to copyright, not product preferences. If Tencent's copyright monopoly is liberalized, differentiated platforms such as NetEase Cloud Music may be able to win another part of the market share.

But on the other hand, in terms of market size and share, Tencent Music and NetEyun Music have obvious differences in online music MAU, payment rate, revenue and net profit. In Tencent music platform, the monthly active users of KuGou Music, QQ Music and Kuwi Music are 298 million, 243 million and 128 million (consulting data from Ai Media), all of which are higher than those of NetEYun Music. It can be said that Tencent is firmly at the top of the industry, far away from the second net Yiyun. There is even a saying in the industry that there is no second place in the online music industry.

However, for Tencent Music, although the copyright staff is in hand these years, the use is not very good, and the performance is not satisfactory.

On the one hand, Tencent Music mainly earns revenue from social entertainment services, as well as online music services. Online music service revenue is mainly composed of advertising service and music subscription revenue, which are 1.06 billion yuan and 1.69 billion yuan respectively. Music subscription revenue accounts for 21.6% of Tencent's total music revenue.

On the other hand, in terms of online music payment, Tencent Music is 7.67%, which is lower than NetEYun Music's 8.8%.

In addition, the loss of Tencent music users and the number of monthly active users are also declining-Q1's online music mobile MAU was 615 million in 2021, down 6.4 per cent from 657 million in the same period last year. The decline is mainly due to the loss of some leisure users of pan-entertainment platform services. In contrast, the mobile MAU of Q1 social entertainment increased by 14.2% to 224 million in 2021 compared with the same period last year.

Compared with NetEase Yun Music, the main sources of income are online music services, social entertainment services and other generated income, which accounted for about 53.6% and 46.4% respectively in fiscal year 2020.

However, NetEYun Music is much lower than Tencent Music in terms of revenue, and is in a state of loss.There is no doubt that NetEyun Music can benefit from this copyright opportunity, but the specific benefits need to be discussed.

Zhang Xiaorong, director of the Deep Science and Technology Research Institute, told Sina Technology that if Tencent Music gave up the exclusive copyright, it would mean giving up the moat to maintain its monopoly position and allowing market competition. Of course, the market size of the online music industry is small, and the business model is single, and the number of users is shrinking, so it is difficult to support multiple competitive platforms.He believes that Tencent Music giving up exclusive copyright is not necessarily a good thing for the industry, because in a market with limited market size, there is fierce competition, which is not conducive to the development of the platform.