“Chart manipulation” has enabled Yin Yue Tai to develop a fan business, but can it support a Chinese version of Billboard?

How crazy are Lu Han’s fans? Douban user Vivian described her "Lu Fan" friends like this:

She is really a die-hard fan of Lu Han. She bought 500 copies of Lu Han's album. She asked me if I wanted to buy it. I hesitated for a moment, and then she said she would give it to me and I could listen to it. I really couldn't understand why she bought 500 copies of the same album with the same content. I asked her and she said she would support him as much as she could and that she was happy to spend money on Lu Han. Last time she was obsessed with the charts, she booked an internet cafe late at night to do the charts, and I was dragged to accompany her again...

"Are all Lu Han fans like this? They seem to be working very hard, and are particularly obsessed."

The spread of “chart-hitting fever”

If you open Weibo or search Baidu for popular stars, you will find that it is definitely not just “Lu Wei” (a homonym for “Lu Wei”, meaning that she only likes Lu Han) who is “demonic”.

According to her profile, ID “水藍的曲01” is a girl born in the 2000s, with 2.2 years of experience in the forum. Most of her 2,468 posts are from the tfboys forum. In a topic called [TFBOYS·Thoughts], "Water Blue Melody 01" described the changes that star chasing has brought to people's lives:

It was the first time for me to be such a crazy fan of a star. Before, I didn’t know what charting meant, and I didn’t understand all the statistics about stars. But when a fourteen-year-old boy appeared in my sight, I could no longer erase his figure. His name is Yi Yang Qianxi! ...Jackie Yi, I do the same things for you every day: express my love, play videos in rotation, send flowers, and vote for you... These things seem to have become a part of my life. I have to do them every day, otherwise I won't feel good for the whole day. But you are so great, I deserve to give you everything...

In fact, what these fans call "charting" has gradually become a typical fan culture in the current pop music circle.

At present, QQ Music, Baidu Tieba, NetEase Cloud Music, Yin Yue Tai and even NetEase LOFTER have successively launched ranking mechanisms. Fans can increase the popularity of their idols and push their favorite stars to the top of the list by liking, recommending and forwarding their idols' works. In order to help their idols rank higher on the charts, there are many fans who have figured out technical posts on the Internet, such as "Music Billboard, Baidu King Chart Tutorial Rules" and "APink Fan Chart Tutorial".

Even though the overall industry environment is not very prosperous, the reason why music charts are so popular is that this mechanism cleverly utilizes fans' emotions towards their idols. If we regard ranking as a product, it would be a bit similar to a large-scale multiplayer online game : there are both commonalities and competition between fan groups, and the sense of competition has become the biggest driving factor in increasing user stickiness and inducing fans to pay.

In an interview with the media, Zhang Dou, the founder of Yin Yue Tai, described the competitive mentality among fans like this: "They feel that if they can't make it into the list, they will lose face. Fans have the same mentality. In Japan, AKB48 has been ranked first in album sales for many years in a row, and many Korean stars can also rank in the top 30 in album sales in the Japanese market, because Japanese fans don't want their own stars to not even make it into the top 30."

Use high-definition MV to attract fans

In 2009, Zhang Dou resigned from Alibaba and started his own business . Initially, Yin Yue Tai's main business was to provide high-definition music MVs. Zhang Dou said that this was mainly influenced by his daughter who was a huge fan of the Korean band Superjunlor at the time. One day, my daughter suddenly said to Zhang Dou: "The quality of Superjunlor MVs that I searched on Baidu, Youku, and Tudou is too bad. It's not pleasant to watch at all."

Zhang Dou suddenly felt that there was a way forward for this matter.

In the first year, the MVs on Yin Yue Tai were mainly purchased by fans from other video websites and then uploaded to the platform. In order to eliminate copyright risks as much as possible, Yin Yue Tai started purchasing genuine copyrights in 2010. After three years of operation , it rose to the top of the domestic MV website with 40 million monthly active users and 4 million daily active users. Until now, copyright is still an important financial expense for Yin Yue Tai, and Yin Yue Tai needs to pay about 1 to 20 million RMB for it every year.

In terms of communication media, music MVs are an extension of music audio - you can listen to the music while the MV is playing, but you cannot listen to the audio as if you are watching the MV. As long as there is a clear point of difference, there are market segments. The idea of ​​using high-definition MVs as a selling point effectively distinguished "Yin Yue Tai" from other music platforms, which helped the then-small "Yin Yue Tai" avoid many direct conflicts with giants.

Of course, if you are like me and don’t have any particular celebrity crush, then you obviously don’t quite understand why a website for watching music videos can have such high user activity; or in other words, to watch an MV, you can just search on Youtube, so does it have to be in high definition?

Zhang Dou told 36Kr that MVs are a typical form of fan consumption, and fans will even watch every MV of their idols over and over again. Therefore, taking MV as the entry point, Yin Yue Tai actually took the initiative to screen users from the very beginning and stratified fans and general audiences. Users who are active on Yin Yue Tai for a long time are basically die-hard fans of a certain singer, and the secondary utilization value of this group of people is obviously higher.

By satisfying the hard demand of fans to watch MVs, Yin Yue Tai has accumulated a group of highly active fan users in the early stage. On this basis, Yin Yue Tai has developed its own music chart: the V Chart.

The business logic centered on the "list" and centered around emotional premium

While writing this article, I checked the latest charts on Yin Yue Tai and found that Park Hyomin (T-ara)'s new song "Sketch Chinese Version" scored 91.54 points, surpassing seemingly more famous stars such as Lu Han, Bibi Zhou, and Jane Zhang, and ranked first on this week's V Chart Mainland China chart; this single also ranked first on the V Chart Mainland China monthly chart with 95.6 points.

How are the values ​​91.54 and 95.6 calculated?

According to the rules of the Yin Yue V Chart, the single score is mainly calculated based on eight data items including the MV's playback, download, collection, mobile phone playback/caching/sharing within a week, and the weight of each part is different. For example, now the weight of complete playback on the site/mobile phone is the highest, both at 18%, followed by PC download site at 15%. It is worth noting that Yin Yue Tai will rank singles and singers in real time based on the cumulative values ​​of the week. The real-time ranking data will be reset after 24:00 on Sunday of that week, and the ranking for the next week will begin.

The data will be reset to zero after 24:00 on Sunday of that week, which means that fans need to continuously refresh the charts in order to keep their idols at the top of the list for a long time. Such rules constantly encourage users to frequently access the platform and share the links of Yin Yue Tai to various channels.

Yin Yue Tai uses fans' enthusiasm for chasing stars to support the traffic and activity of the entire platform, but Zhang Dou is not satisfied with this: "Yin Yue Tai wants to do fan economy . But whether it is likes, reposts or brushing topics, they are not fan economy. The real fan economy should link traffic, user stickiness and commercial services together. The so-called 'economy' must ultimately lead to 'transactions'."

With a large number of fans, Yin Yue Tai naturally thought of providing fan services. Since last year, the sale of celebrity peripherals has become an important way for the platform to realize revenue. After a period of exploration, the entire process has basically run smoothly. "Now our monthly sales of peripherals can exceed last year's annual sales."

During Lu Han’s concert some time ago, the 551 sets of Lu Han concert gift packages launched by Yin Yue Tai (with prices divided into three levels, the most expensive being 7,777 yuan) were all sold out within 15 seconds. The 80,000 copies of Lu Han’s new album that were launched on the platform in January this year were also sold out within 89 days.

Not only fans, Zhang Dou believes that Chinese artists nowadays really need a third-party platform to assist them in accomplishing things other than singing and releasing albums. "All artists in China are self-employed. South Korea's SM Entertainment has about 600 people serving more than a dozen groups of artists. They use an industrial system to mass-produce artists. In China, a record company has 30 to 40 people serving 7 to 8 artists, but the cost per artist is actually not much."

In addition, the overall star-making environment in the Chinese-speaking region is quite different from that in South Korea. Previously, most Chinese celebrities were signed to group-type economic companies such as Huayi Brothers, Hairun Pictures, and TE Media. However, in recent years, it can be seen that artists with good developments such as Fan Bingbing and Huang Xiaoming have left the group and established their own personal studios.

“Although artists are working on their own, to be honest, the quality of their music has dropped a lot compared to before,” Zhang Dou said. “But on the one hand, artists used to have to give a large part of their money to their management companies, but now they can obviously make more money working on their own. On the other hand, ordinary people don’t have particularly high requirements for the quality of songs, because their consumption demand for music entertainment has increased. You can see that now pop songs with melodies like children’s songs can become popular.”

However, Zhang Dou believes that this small team working method still has its own constraints: due to funding and manpower constraints, personal studios often cannot spend a lot of money to promote artists like traditional economic companies, so they are also in urgent need of finding ways to expose artists, and Yin Yue Tai just fills this gap.

Will China have Billboard?

Using MVs as traffic portals to build a fan community, using competition-based rankings to stimulate fan activity and consumption, and ultimately converting fans into consumers of albums and peripherals - this model has indeed supported a music platform centered around "ranks."

But in the domestic ranking ecosystem where rankings are “purely fan-dominated,” how much value do rankings have?

Billboard's rankings are based on consumption statistics including downloads, radio, streaming, etc., including singles and MVs. The more universal data sources ensure the authority of the charts. Although there are cases where fans vote for the charts (especially the Kpop version of Billboard), they are rare. On the other hand, in China, in addition to the problem of fans rushing to the top of the charts , there is also the problem of copyright fragmentation and rampant piracy, which makes data difficult to monitor and affects the authority of domestic charts.

Only authority can provide guidance to the market, and Billboard is a weather vane that music fans all over the world pay attention to. This kind of weather vane has a much greater impact in the European and American markets than in China: don’t forget that European and American people pay for music.

When you are in Europe and the United States, you listen to music by buying CDs, digital albums, and paying to download singles. At this time, you have decision-making costs, and the charts are of guiding value to you. When you are in China, choosing which song to listen to is just a click away, and if you don’t like it, you can switch to another song in three seconds. You hardly need to pay any cost, so the charts are not that important to you.

The lack of authority and the unique music ecology in China have made domestic charts not only "purely fan-dominated", but also have basically no influence on the mass music market. In the United States or South Korea, entertainment media, record companies, and talent agencies all keep a close eye on the charts and allocate resources accordingly. in the country, only fans are excited about the rankings.

Being able to make fans happy is of course valuable, but how long they can be happy is a question. If fans find that their desperate efforts to get their idols on the charts do not really help increase their idols’ popularity, their enthusiasm for topping the charts may gradually wane.

Maybe there are already some signs. A netizen on Zhihu commented on the “chart-making” issue:

As a fan who is voting for my idol, I feel really sad. First of all, the champion of the first week can not only be on the Billboard's first-week champion, but also appear on an entire page of the People's Daily. This honor is really what all fans want to do for their idols. But it is only achieved by fans (even the first place is achieved by fans on Taobao). Can people who like music recognize it? Are passers-by willing to listen? Wouldn't that be more offensive?

Now, it’s not just the 2D audience, many idol fans also increasingly like to watch their idols’ videos on Station B. Why should fans go to Yin Yue Tai but now they are spontaneously turning to B station? Because being on the charts is really painful, uninteresting, boring and dark. All the data is bought by fans, and all the comments on the MVs are also bought. So this is just a website for fans.

What can be felt from the text is that in the process of brushing the charts all night long, fans may eventually be excited because their idols have successfully reached the top, but more often than not, it may be the mechanical brushing of data and forwarding that consumes their physical strength and enthusiasm. However, due to the lack of authority of the rankings, even if an idol tops a ranking, it may be difficult for fans to fulfill their wish to introduce the idol to more people.

China's charts are still very far away from Billboard.

“Xiami may be right, but now is not the right time”

Zhang Dou told me that he actually doesn’t understand music and he treats fans purely as a business.

In order to seize resources further upstream in the industrial chain. In addition to fan services, Yin Yue Tai has also extended its hand to star-making and created a grassroots incubation platform called Stage. However, Zhang Dou said that Yin Yue Tai still has a platform approach and does not want to become an economic company in the traditional sense.

"We divided the reasons why TFBOYS became popular into 20 nodes. As long as a seedling meets the first 9 conditions, we think he can give it a try. However, Yin Yue Tai only makes initial investment and does not need a particularly high return, just to enhance the platform's control over upstream resources. After they are basically formed, we will transport them to the downstream of the industry chain such as Warner, and a 10% to 15% stake will be enough. In the end, we still want to make money by taking over their fan services and doing fan economy. Whether it will succeed in the end is a matter of probability."

At the end of the interview, we talked to Zhang Dou about Spotify, which reminded him of Wang Hao, the founder of Xiami Music. At the beginning of this year, Wang Hao announced that he would leave Xiami and join DingTalk. A media outlet reported this with the headline "Xiami founder Wang Hao joins DingTalk and says he is disappointed with the music industry." The article mentioned a WeChat Moments post by Wang Hao himself on the evening of January 20:

"Some industries are destined to die. I might as well wait for their rebirth."

"When Nangua left Xiami, I happened to be in Hangzhou and asked him out for a drink. He complained to me: I have been working in music for seven years and no one cares about me. When I was about to leave, there were people arguing with me every day..." Zhang Dou recalled the scene when the two met when Wang Hao just resigned from Xiami: "But I think there will definitely be a market for pure music consumption. This is a huge market. From this point of view, Xiami's idea may be right. It's just that current fan consumption has not developed to that stage. More people start chasing stars out of hormones and love. Now there is a greater demand for consuming 'people', and music is just one of the carriers of this person."

"I don't understand music, but I think an industry must have income to develop. Yin Yue Tai treats fans as a business. No matter what the final result is, it is better for the entire industry to have a voice than no voice."

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