NetEase Cloud Music Product Analysis

1. Introduction

After analyzing the iterations of the QQ Music APP last year, I rarely use NetEase Cloud Music to listen to songs after being a QQ Music member for half a year due to music copyright issues. I only think of it occasionally when I listen to folk songs. I also discovered the "Listen Together" function by accident. I tried it a few times and found it quite interesting.

At the same time, in order to divert traffic to the live broadcast, NetEase Cloud Music has added live broadcast entrances on the homepage, playback interface, comments, and other locations. After accidentally clicking in a few times, I saw a young lady in "cool" clothing appearing on the entire screen. For me, who has only watched live broadcasts of e-sports competitions, it really scared me. After it happens several times in a row, especially in an external scenario, it is really "socially dead".

This strange "surprise" and unfamiliarity aroused my interest in analyzing the iteration of the Cloud Music APP. I mainly wanted to understand what attempts NetEase Cloud Music has made in innovation with less copyright, how to truly realize the characteristics of a "music community", and how to expand the differences with other music apps.

Although not every product iteration is fully reflected in the user interface, there are some background detail optimizations that are imperceptible to the user end, such as changes in the location of certain data points, user data statistics methods, code optimization, minor adjustments to the UI design, etc. It is rather one-sided to explain the product iteration situation only from the adjustment of the user interface; however, through the revision of the page and the data after the product iteration, we can roughly analyze the product dynamics, music market dynamics and user preferences of NetEase Cloud Music.

To this end, I will analyze the iteration of Cloud Music in the past year from several aspects, including market dynamics, product iteration details, competitive product analysis and operation paths.

2. Recent Development of Cloud Music

1. Short video + live broadcast

Since 2018, short video apps such as Douyin and Kuaishou have opened up new ideas for NetEase Cloud Music. In March 2018, NetEase Cloud Music was updated to version 5.0, and “Video” appeared in the first-level menu bar, but user reviews were not very good. Later, it tried to add a live broadcast module. Although user feedback was still not very good, the revenue of Cloud Music increased significantly because live broadcast brought in more active users and a large number of virtual items sales.

2. Ali Capital Injection

On September 6, 2019, Alibaba confirmed the acquisition of NetEase Kaola for US$2 billion. At the same time, Alibaba participated in NetEase Cloud Music's US$700 million B2 round of financing as the lead investor. This money helped NetEase Cloud Music to reach direct cooperation with Warner Music, Universal Music, and Sony Music after the exclusive copyright of Tencent Music expired in 2020. In August 2020, NetEase Cloud Music’s “Vinyl VIP” annual card benefits were incorporated into Alibaba’s “88VIP” ecosystem.

3. Innovative attempts

After losing much advantage in the copyright dispute, it has been looking for new ways of development, hoping to attract more online music users.

4. Postponement of listing

On May 26, 2021, NetEase Cloud Music officially submitted its application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but later postponed its IPO. Judging from the net income in the listing application, NetEase Cloud Music is still suffering from losses. Net losses remained at RMB 2 billion in 2018 and 2019, and then increased to RMB 3 billion in 2020.

5. Digital music antitrust

After the State Administration for Market Regulation launched antitrust action against Tencent Music in July this year and demanded the cancellation of its exclusive copyright, the music track began to become active. In the same month, Alibaba applied for the Xiami Music trademark; in September, ByteDance announced that it would invest 1 billion yuan to develop a music APP; after the top capitals were eager to try, and with the threshold for music copyright being lowered, many small and medium-sized players were ready to move. In this context, if Cloud Music wants to break through the siege and expand its market share, it must work hard on innovative functions.

Next, we will analyze the iterations and user reviews of Cloud Music over the past year.

3. Iterative Analysis

The following will conduct a comprehensive iteration analysis from the perspectives of Cloud Music’s iteration in the past year, comparison of iterations of similar apps, iteration analysis of Cloud Music’s key functions, user reviews, and product operation strategies.

1. Overview of iterations in the past year

In the past year, there have been 48 iterations in total, of which 20 versions have launched new functions, accounting for 41.6%. The other update logs are all marked with "known functions have been fixed".

Data source: Qimai Data

Judging from the update logs in the past year, product iterations can be divided into three main aspects:

1) Improved basic functions: mainly functions that are basically supported by similar apps: such as personal homepage supports customized module sorting, search supports sorting by lyrics, etc.

2) Optimization of its own advantageous functions: For the Cloud Music APP, the modules such as recommended playlists and song reviews are particularly prominent. In addition, it also includes optimizing music sharing, providing more sound effects, user membership management, etc.

The main optimization points include the following:

1. Supports sharing of playlists, which can be collaborated by multiple people;
2. Song comments can be made into videos with one click, and the "Hug" Easter egg is available online;
3. 【Music Jar】 supports a new way of sharing music and supports adding music stories when sharing songs.

3) Innovative functions: As it does not have an advantage in copyright, Cloud Music has made many attempts in innovation, mainly in live broadcast, social networking, radio, karaoke, video and other modules.

The following innovative features have been mainly updated:

1. [Listen Together], I will share my earphones with you, and you can invite others to listen to songs together;
2. 【Radio】upgraded to 【Podcast】;
3. 【Mlog】, supports distributed Mlog, generating music with stories. It supports publishing pictures, texts and music, and can also create short videos to create Mlog, which is similar to the form of Tik Tok short videos;
4. Other new features, such as [Record Collection Shelf], [Memory Album], [Wish List], etc., are value-added functions provided for some niche users.

Regarding the main functions that have been iterated in the past year, especially the innovative functions, the following will focus on analyzing the usage experience, user evaluation, user data, etc.

2. Comparison of similar APP iterations

In addition to analyzing the iterations of Cloud Music in the past year, we also collected the main updates of QQ Music and Kugou Music in the past year.

1) QQ Music

The version has been updated 30 times in the past year. Judging from the newly launched functions, some functions are similar to NetEase Cloud Music. For example, modules such as "Listen Together" and "Podcast" have been launched one after another. In addition, the "Music Room" module has been launched, which supports multiple people listening to music and watching videos together.

At the same time, the general social and music function modules such as [Putong Community], [Radio], and [Listening to Books] are optimized almost every month. It can be seen that the development focus of QQ Music is gradually on expanding social attributes and increasing user activity and usage time.

2) Kugou Music

Kugou Music is a music APP that I often used in junior high and high school. I basically haven’t used it since then. I didn’t expect that it has so many daily active users and occupies a large market share. I guess it has relative advantages and a fixed audience.

According to Qimai data, its version has been updated 25 times in the past year. Judging from the iteration documents, the entire platform is basically divided into two modules: music and live broadcast, which shows that live broadcast accounts for a very large proportion of the functions in Kugou Music.

3) Summary

From the iteration of the three apps in the past year, we found the following characteristics:

1. Music apps are paying more and more attention to community social functions. They have added more gameplay in the comment area and barrage area, and also added music social interaction with acquaintances and strangers such as [Listen Together] and [Watch Together].
2. Provide more forms of pan-music, including short videos, radio stations, audiobooks, live broadcasts, etc.;
3. There is a clear trend of apps "borrowing" from each other. Judging from the updates over the past year, NetEase Cloud Music was the first to launch features such as "Listen Together" and "Podcasts," followed by QQ Music, with a time interval of nearly half a year.
4. Many of the various functional modules added by music apps, such as [short video], [live broadcast], [watch together], [listen together], etc., have borrowed from the core functions of other popular apps, such as Douyin, Huya Live, Weiguang, etc.

3. User evaluation overview

So, what are users’ evaluations of the various functions of Cloud Music over the past year?

The picture below shows the user reviews I searched and viewed from Qimai data, classified by newly launched functions and key optimized functions, using function points as keywords. After excluding the data of 5-star fake reviews and 1-star malicious bad reviews, the proportion of 4-star reviews was counted, and the first and last reviews were randomly intercepted, which can roughly show the user evaluation profile of several functional points.

By browsing the user reviews of several functional points after they were launched and the distribution of star ratings on Qimai Data, we can get the following information:

1) Among the new features that have been launched, the [Listen Together] and [Podcast] modules have more reviews, and most of them tend to be positive. However, other new features such as [Record Shelf], [Memory Album], and [Wish List] have very few user reviews, and most of them are negative reviews of emotional release.

In addition, for the [Shared Playlist] module, which has just been online for 3 months, there are 17 reviews, which is not a small number and the evaluation content is also medium.

2) For the functions that Cloud Music has focused on iterating and optimizing, such as [Song Reviews] and [Playlists], the number of user reviews in the past year has approached thousands, and most of them are suggestion-type reviews, which are of great reference value for function iteration.

There are also many reviews related to [Song Sharing], which are mainly feedback on problems encountered when sharing on WeChat and Moments, such as only showing the song title when sharing a song, song sharing causing the program to get stuck, etc.; for the [Karaoke] module, which has been online for two years, 3-star reviews account for a relatively large proportion, and the positive and negative reviews are almost the same.

[Mlog] module has fewer reviews, but three- and four-star reviews account for a large proportion. The preliminary inference is that the number of people using this function is relatively small but they are relatively satisfied with it.

Summarize

From these evaluation data, we can only partially understand the evaluation situation of a small number of users. In general, it can be seen that users have a strong resistance to newly launched functions, and basically they report that they do not need these new functions; users are relatively satisfied with iterative functions and are willing to report real problems; in addition, for updates that are not easy to use or have serious problems, it can also be seen from the evaluation content.

If you want to professionally analyze user iterations, you will have to spend more time and combine APP usage data, daily logins, daily views, etc., and use more professional data analysis tools and methods to draw truly effective conclusions.

Below, we will conduct an in-depth analysis of the functions that have been iterated in the past year.

4. Key Function Analysis

1. Song Sharing

Sharing method: On the sharing page, you can see 6 sharing methods: music jar, listen together, share card, lyrics video, lyrics picture, and song card. Among them, [Music Jar] is a functional module that was just launched in August. It mainly supports the creation of music stories by adding text, photos and other content when sharing songs. It is a relatively novel way of sharing music, a bit similar to short videos.

Sharing channels: Supports sharing through mainstream social channels such as WeChat, QQ, Weibo, DingTalk, etc. It also supports sharing to expert circles or expert friends. Among them, users share to WeChat Moments more frequently.

Judging from the comments on song sharing, the main feedback is that after sharing to WeChat Moments, only the song title is displayed in Moments, but not the singer, and the song cannot be played directly. The following two are the display interfaces of sharing the same song to Moments using several music apps:

1) You can see that there is no direct play button, and it only supports jumping to the page to play. Therefore, I guess this form of playback is a unified requirement of WeChat. No matter which music APP is shared to the Moments, it must jump to the page to play.

2) In addition, when sharing with QQ Music, Kuwo Music, and Migu Music, the singer’s name will be included, but NetEase Cloud Music is different and will include the album name. One of the reasons is that people suspect that WeChat Moments has opened a "back door" for Tencent's music apps. After all, in a sharing scenario, providing more information will attract more attention. The second reason is that people suspect that it is the result of automatic selection by NetEase Cloud Music. Considering that Cloud Music has fewer copyrights and mainly contains cover songs, including the names of cover singers will affect the listening experience of shared songs.

2. Song reviews

In August last year, due to the large number of depressive comments in the comment section of NetEase Cloud Music, many people were complaining without any reason. NetEase Cloud Music was jokingly called "Netease Depression Cloud" and was asked by the government to rectify the situation. After that, it made many optimizations in the "Song Comments" module.

1) Launch the “Hug” Easter Egg: I couldn’t find a direct entrance to this function in the comment section. I only found out how to operate it after searching on Baidu.

2) You can make videos: You can directly use netizens’ comments, combine them with your own photos, and edit the text to make a commentary video, which is to publish Mlog.

PS: At present, I have not thought of the application scenario of quoting other people’s comments to generate videos. It feels like I developed this function with reference to short videos and combining various elements in the APP such as songs, texts, photos, etc. out of an experimental mentality.

3. Karaoke/Karaoke room

In the context of being unable to obtain more music copyrights and urgently needing to increase user stickiness, Cloud Music has made many innovative attempts, including karaoke rooms.

The scenario of a karaoke room is different from that of individuals singing karaoke privately and then posting their songs, and the user groups are also different. People like me who are more socially anxious will never join a karaoke room to "howl". The user groups of a karaoke room are mainly singers with a desire to perform, tourists who want to kill time, and social people who are looking for companionship. To this end, Cloud Music provides many gameplay and room modes. |

1) Room types: karaoke competition, chat room, game room, music listening and self-study room, etc., which can include a large number of user groups.

2) User activity: By entering the karaoke room at different time periods, it can be found that user activity on weekends and evenings is significantly higher than on weekdays and during the day. In addition, judging from the number of participants in each room, it is far less than professional karaoke software such as Kugou and Changba.

4. Listen together

Judging from NetEase Cloud's innovative attempts in the past year, I personally think that [Listen Together] is a relatively successful innovative feature, and it has been iterated and optimized very frequently. The objects of listening to music together have been expanded from friends to strangers with similar music tastes. In addition, various social functions such as voice chat and text chat have been added, and many interactive gameplays have been launched. From the current perspective, this module will become a key optimized function of NetEase Cloud Music in the future.

1) Listening partners: Listen with strangers. You can directly use NetEase Cloud Music's intelligent random matching, or you can set music preferences, gender preferences, and matching frequency for targeted matching. You can also listen with friends you follow.

2) Supports multiple interaction modes, including text chat, voice chat and emoticon interaction. You can click on the avatar to view the list of songs that each other likes. In addition, after listening to music with a stranger for more than 5 minutes, you can choose to uncover the face to view more information about the other person, generate more interactions through similar music interests, and even achieve the purpose of making friends.

3) User experience: I have tried it several times and the experience is good. Because I often share my favorite songs with friends, with this function we can listen to many songs together, which is very convenient. However, some problems were also found.

The first point is related to the listening habits of the two matching parties. Sometimes the matched users are not very compatible, and one party may not like the songs in the listening list. Since both parties can change songs, there is a possibility that one of them will change songs frantically, affecting the other party's listening experience; the second point is that if the other party puts the APP in the background to play music, even if no operation is performed, it will affect the playback progress of the song on my side.

5. Record collection rack, memory album, wish list

In early February, in the updated version 8.1.20, three new modules were added to the homepage, which currently cannot be closed. For me, this function is useless. I only use the Cloud Music APP as a music listening software and don’t want to display other information about myself like in the circle of friends.

Overall, the [Record Collection Shelf] function is understandable, at least it is a display related to music.

As for [Memory Album], I personally feel that it is a bit similar to the photo album of Kugou. In that APP, I am willing to upload some photos, mainly because they can be used as background pictures when playing songs, but I don’t quite understand why it appears here in the Cloud Music APP. Suspicion is also a way to socialize with strangers. Just imagine that after a stranger uses the "Listen Together" module with you, sees your homepage, and discovers that you have tasteful photos, it will indeed greatly increase the possibility of making friends.

As for the "Wish List", I really can't think of an application scenario. As for the name of this module, I just feel it is an old-fashioned space log of whining. Or maybe I misunderstood it and it is a functional module used by NetEase Cloud Music to collect user feedback. In that case, it is suggested to change it to a more direct name.

V. Conclusion

Looking at the iteration of NetEase Cloud Music in the past year, the following points are summarized:

1) In the context of a significant disadvantage in copyright, many attempts have been made in innovative business, which is very challenging for the product managers of Cloud Music. Sometimes users don’t buy into the functions provided, and may even accidentally anger them.

2) For a music app, NetEase Cloud Music has currently added a lot of miscellaneous modules, which are very useless to some loyal users and greatly reduce the user experience. However, for some users, even if the functions provided are not very necessary or even they feel they will not use them, it actually just means that this function is not designed for this group of people, because sometimes the functions we hate are the main source of revenue for this product, such as the [look live broadcast] module that had entrances everywhere in the APP before.

3) Product homogeneity is becoming increasingly serious. The similarity of functional modules of similar APPs is as high as 80%; for similar APPs, they will borrow some functional modules from them and then piece them together.

4) It is very difficult to make entertainment products that satisfy users’ spiritual enjoyment outstanding and sustainable. I may no longer follow the iterations of QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music in the future. Generally speaking, they have deviated from the positioning of music listening software and provide a lot of social, live broadcast, karaoke and other general music content. There is no need for much analysis. I will summarize the design experience of B-end products later when I have time.

Author: Julyseven777

Source: July777