How does NetEase Cloud Music differ from those slutty and cheap ones out there?

In the Chinese Internet world, NetEase's product style is often unique. This uniqueness enables NetEase to always benefit from establishing competitive barriers at low cost while forming a unified brand culture.

Gary Hamel believes that the business system in the digital age no longer has the characteristic of "continuity". It is difficult for the Internet to give birth to companies that rely on a single business for eternity like oil or real estate giants. Therefore, companies should pursue evolutionary advantages rather than just worrying about victory or defeat at a certain point in time.

Take Google as an example. It has many failed products, but the threat it poses to the entire industry is that there is always a constant influx of top talent into this technology company that "allows failure." They constitute Google's innovation engine.

On the other hand, since the mobile Internet has become established, the increasingly expensive traffic has become a pain in the heart of Internet practitioners. Just like after Walmart has gained channel power, there will always be brand owners like Procter & Gamble to compete with it. This is also one of the reasons why content entrepreneurship and IP economy are so popular.

Combining the above two theories to look at the rise of NetEase's assets in recent years will help us understand the phenomenon that it has entered many fields with extremely high asymmetry and quickly become equal to the original market leaders.

For example, NetEase has become Tencent's biggest rival in the mobile gaming industry, and its cross-border e-commerce business is not inferior to its earlier competitors. Even in the low-net-worth tool industry, its Youdao brand has also made great achievements. Its note-taking products are separate from EverNote, and its dictionary products even surpass those of the old brand Kingsoft.

More worth mentioning is NetEase Cloud Music . After the merger of QQ Music and Ocean Music this summer, everyone thought that the war had ended early. However, the influx of capital still seems unable to stop the independent growth of NetEase Cloud Music.

On October 24, 2016, folk singer Zhao Lei's new song "Chengdu" was first released on NetEase Cloud Music. Within 24 hours, more than 30,000 comments were posted under the song, and "there is a story behind every piece of content."

Later, NetEase Cloud Music CEO Zhu Yiwen described the design intention of this community-oriented rather than tool-oriented product in an interview: "The upgrade from a player does not lie in the addition of functions, but in the empowerment of new creative capabilities. Building a house does not mean that there is a village. Only when there are neighbors walking around can we be called folks."

This seems to be an inheritance of NetEase's unique commentary-based social gene.

Han Han once told a joke, saying that many governments did not anticipate the serious consequences of connecting to the Internet. They thought they could control it like traditional media, but they overlooked a very critical detail, which is that in addition to the monitor, people also have a keyboard in front of them.

This is a huge change across politics and economics, and if there is a choice between silence and expression, almost everyone will choose the latter. Just like magazines need to pay people to convince them to write for them, billions of users create content on Facebook's platform day and night without establishing any transactional relationship.

In many cases, the commercial potential of a consumer product depends on the extent to which it can mobilize users' enthusiasm for use. This is the inheritance and continuation of the ancient Web 2.0 spirit. Napster is certainly great, but its glory comes from the technological revolution. When the revolution is completed - or it can be understood as a failure - it is digital culture that takes over the fire.

The impact of social ecology on this year's US election is also a new social issue

Cultural differences are a powerful means of breaking away from the surface of homogeneity, just as you cannot tell the difference between the English and Norwegians in a pub with the naked eye, but you can easily distinguish the imprints of Anglo culture and Viking culture.

In the online music market which lacks room for imagination, the rules of the game always revolve around resource allocation. The boldness of QQ Music is not much different from the history of iTunes ten years ago. It strictly adheres to retail logic. In other words, as long as the supply is rich enough and the channels are friendly enough, customers will continue to come.

NetEase Cloud Music’s confrontation is more like a tribute to literary fetishism. No matter how dazzling Wangfujing is, there will always be people flocking to the more personalized Sanlitun .

In addition to the comment system, NetEase Cloud Music is also proud of its playlist system, which mobilizes users. The practice of allowing users to create their own song albums has been explored by Xiami Music and even the previous SongTaste (now closed). Users' independent creation of song albums can not only present a re-combination of content, but is also seen as a means to fully utilize song usage.

However, before NetEase Cloud Music, editors’ aesthetics and location recommendations were the primary support for the song album system. This is definitely not a mistake - I have collected many albums that were painstakingly made by other users on Xiami and Luowang, and even the accompanying texts are beautiful poems - but this kind of carefully prepared meal is obviously not as attractive as a free-to-eat buffet.

Hong Kong director Wong Jing once said something to the effect that it is best for young people to take their girlfriends to see the sophisticated works of Wong Kar-wai on their first date, but after the two have become familiar with each other and entered a period of passionate love where there is no need for pretense, they will definitely see the secular works of Wong Jing when they go to the cinema again.

According to figures released by NetEase Cloud Music, users create an average of 420,000 playlists within the app every day. In other words, even if we take into account that the product was also promoted with the help of high-quality resources in its early stages of development, such as the participation of professional musicians and opinion leaders, the more time passes, the more this kind of education from the top is replaced by large-scale feedback.

"Exclusively for top students, background music for brain cell engineering", "A song that takes you back to middle school", "The leg-shaking song that reveals your age", "A complete collection of Apple's advertising songs/press conference music over the years", "Would you choose Chen Li or Zhang Xuan"... Just from the names of these playlists, it is already highly consistent with the sharing principles of social networks. The expectations of users after creating a playlist have also changed from whether it can be recommended by editors to whether it will be forwarded to others' friends circle.

Some people call it the "playlist psychology" of NetEase Cloud Music. It is similar to the tag function of Instagram. While reducing the cost of content production, it tries its best to meet users' needs for recognizability.

At the same time, the boundary between user experience and user operation is also becoming blurred. For example, the playlist of NetEase CEO Ding Lei is often ridiculed. This is consistent with the operational idea of ​​NetEase's popular mobile game "Onmyoji", which invited Ding Lei to live broadcast card drawing, that is, to completely abandon the creation of a sense of distance and instead embrace the public's entertainment needs.

Ding Lei doesn't mind that this sense of disharmony will undermine the CEO's sense of authority

This was originally a user operation job, but it ultimately improved the user experience.

In Zhu Yiwen's view, playlists can become a medium for social interaction. Even without a relationship chain, people can make friends through similar music tastes, which is often the case in NetEase Cloud Music. "If I have a friend with similar tastes to me, I don't need to make a playlist myself. I can just collect my friend's playlists and update them when my friend updates them. This structure is naturally based on social interaction."

These words actually reflect the long-term silence of Douban FM, which seems to be more suitable for this task. The commercial value of literary youth has been verified many times, and the stereotype of "poor and pretentious" has been fiercely shattered by the rising consumerism. However, in this process, the cruel reshuffle is always full of surprises. Whether it is Tencent or NetEase, they were complete outsiders before they acted as harvesters. However, those who have been cultivating the land for many years are about to become the first batch of landless farmers.

It's really fate.

The example of NetEase Cloud Music reminds me of Japan's late-night diner. In economically highly developed cities, people enjoy its prosperity and richness to the fullest. The crowded commercial centers can meet almost all life needs. Even on the other side of the earth, goods will be transported here within a day with the roaring aircraft engines. Everything shows unparalleled efficiency and convenience, leading to endless praise for capital and material.

But after nightfall, there will always be a canteen that is only open late at night, and customers who are familiar with the place will come in one after another, enjoying the slow flow of time and the unique food, and sharing their unique stories.

The Michelin restaurants in Ginza are certainly high-end and elegant, but you cannot deny that some people are nostalgic for the taste of late-night restaurants hidden in the alleys, and the total number of customers that these scattered places can accommodate is actually not inferior to those highly centralized entrances.