Who killed Xiami Music?

January 5, 2021 Savior

This time, Xiami Music is really going to fall.

Today, Xiami Music officially announced that it will stop service on February 5 . Users will no longer be able to log in Xiami Music at 0:00 on March 5th.

The rumors that Xiami Music is at stake, a month ago was a lot of noise, and now, its story has finally opened to the end.

Xiami's Sunrise: The Father of Niche Music

There are only two types of music in China: pop music and non-pop music.

Wang Hao, the founder of Xiami, once said . He formed a band when he was in school, and started a piano shop after graduation. He is also an underground music organizer in Hangzhou. He likes Smashing Pumpkins the most.

Since its birth in 2007, Xiami Music has carried Wang Hao's spiritual genes. At that time, digital music was just emerging, and Xiami Music was a music kingdom built brick by brick by many fairy music lovers.

▲ Originally Xiami Music was called "Emumo", which means "Earn Music & Money", hoping to fill up the musicians.

Xiami Music has more than 500 million original playlists. Every "creator" and "tourist" here is very hardworking. Behind each playlist is a long-form recommendation. Every album has other music platforms. There is no detailed introduction.

▲Detailed introduction of "Hotel California" in Chinese and English)

Many people have learned about 1,000+ genres, heard the most distinctive musicians, and met the most like-minded music friends.

Xiami also excavated a large number of outstanding independent musicians through the "Search for Light Project". Many people also learned about Jin Wenqi, Qiu Bi, Sound Toys, Fang Shi Er, Cheng Bi, Yanchi, He Xiaohe…

▲ Detailed music classification

For the audience, Xiami also has an anti-"digital intelligence" recommendation. Wang Hao said :

90% of users like Faye Wong, so the recommended song should be 10% that everyone does not know.

This also made the "small but beautiful and diverse" Xiami music once at the top of the contempt chain, becoming a utopia for niche music lovers and the spiritual home of many people.

▲Picture from: Zinc scale

In 2010, Xiami also started the online payment model.

At the time, the Xiami platform allowed users to upload songs, and listeners would have to pay if they wanted to download them. This money would be used to pay the music copyright owners, forming a positive cycle of "UGC production model + online payment model", so that "musicians make money." ".

However, users did not form a payment habit at the time. This was also resisted by many musicians such as Li Zhi, Zhou Yunpeng, Zuo Xiaocurse, etc. Wang Hao once said that he felt chilled because Xiami insisted on the paid download model while compensating for copyright fees for illegal uploads. The annual copyright fee paid by Xiami is more than ten times the income .

At the same time, two "big reshuffles" of the Chinese music industry also came.

As early as the end of 2009, the Ministry of Culture issued the "Notice of the Ministry of Culture on Strengthening and Improving the Review of Online Music Content", and the legalization of online music in China started; in July 2015, the National Copyright Administration issued the "Regarding Ordering Online Music Service Providers to Stop "Notice on Authorized Dissemination of Musical Works" requires all copyright-free musical works to be offline.

According to statistics , from 2005 to 2015, music websites dropped from 400 to 16.

China's online music market has also officially changed from the era of "Hundred Birds Contending" of Baidu MP3, Qianqianjingteng, and Kugou Music to an era dominated by big capital.

Zhang Zhaoyi, chief strategy officer of music copyright content company HIFIVE, once said to "Shen Ran" :

Xiami is a belief-level feeling for users. It's just that Xiami and Douban encountered the same embarrassment. The flashes are obvious to all, but no capital is willing to recharge them.

At that time, capital had begun to invade the music market. Tencent Music and Ocean Music (which owns Kuwo Music and Kugou Music) were the two major players in the music copyright war. Xiami Music was outnumbered.

So in 2013, it finally joined the giant Alibaba, ushering in the biggest turning point in its career.

However, Xiami's road to the altar also began to fall.

Xiami's Twilight: The Death of Idealism

With feelings, memories, and stories, everyone opens the music app to listen to songs, and Tencent has quickly caught up with the wave at this time.

▲ Zhihu user reviews

In 2015, Xiami Music and Tiantiandongting merged into Ali Music, which is highly regarded by Ali Entertainment, but it did not expect that Tencent QQ Music and Ocean Music merged into Tencent Music Entertainment Group TME, winning an online music platform accounted for 90% % Of the copyright, from then on.

And Xiami Music, mixed with the sound of selling and merging, has moved on a path of miserable strategy.

On July 15, 2015, Gao Xiaosong and Song Ke formally joined Ali Music. They later chose to change the version of "Tiantian Tingting" to "Ali Planet", and wanted to spend a lot of money to build an idealized platform for the entire industry chain, just like the music version of Taobao. , Can broadcast live, can perform, can produce music, can sell tickets around, as well as a community platform, covering the entire music ecology.

Ali Music also puts almost all energy here. But it turns out that this is an ideal planet.

Forcible upgrades, complicated functions, poor experience, and many other reasons have caused a large loss of hundreds of millions of users every day. In less than 7 months, Ali Planet has come to an end.

As the tide dissipated, Xiami also lost its competitive advantage in the copyright battle and retreated steadily.

According to statistics, Tencent Music Group had 15 million songs in copyright at that time, while Xiami Music had only 4 million songs.

After Ali Planet disappeared, the CEO of Ali Music changed from Gao Xiaosong, to Song Ke, to Zhang Yu, to Yang Weidong, and to Zhu Shunyan. The original founder of Xiami, Wang Hao, returned briefly at the end of 2016 and left soon. When he left, Once said in the circle of friends:

I have been in this industry for eight years. The original intention was to keep this industry up to date, but now the status quo of the industry is outrageously absurd.

With strategic decision-making mistakes and the fiasco of the copyright war, Xiami Music users lost their copyrights and suffered losses year after year.

Gradually, Xiami Music is no longer the jewel of Ali.

In July 2019, Xiami Music was transferred from Alibaba Entertainment to the innovative business group. In September, Alibaba turned to NetEase Cloud Music to raise US$700 million.

NetEase Cloud Music, which came from behind, has opened a new world in the user community and social field at this time.

Last August, Taobao 88VIP's bonus platform members also changed from Xiami to NetEase Cloud. 36Kr previously asked people familiar with the matter and learned that after investing in NetEase Cloud Music, Xiami also gave the other party some copyrights.

At that time, Xiami's status was already very delicate.

This is also after the acquisition of Yahoo China, Are you hungry, and Youku, Alibaba Entertainment has once again fallen into the "acquisition circle".

These industry unicorns have always started to disappear after the "selling" giant Ali. This is inseparable from Ali's e-commerce genes . For Youku and Xiami, Ali did not make good use of their blue ocean traffic after acquiring them, and always tried to make them serve e-commerce in turn.

Although Wang Hao later said in an interview with the media:

The dried shrimps died when they were not sold.

Alibaba Entertainment is still trying new models, but in the "2020 China Mobile Internet Autumn Report" recently released by Questmobile , we did not even see Xiami Music again.

If it weren't for being shut down a month ago, Xiami Music would already exist in many people's eyes.

Xiami's Tomorrow: The Battle of Music Ecosystem

A tornado that has already revealed its clues has taken away Xiami's dream of idealism for 14 years.

In fact, Xiami insists on its niche music route, raises the fee threshold, and gains the popularity of loyal users. It is not impossible to survive.

It's just that Xiami is no longer the original small website that only used love to generate electricity.

Under the umbrella of Alibaba Entertainment, it needs to grow into a comprehensive music platform , but also bears a broader future for the public.

But in this music track, Tencent has won a big victory, and even NetEase Cloud Music ranked fourth.

The online music industry has become a capital game. Music critic Zou Xiaoying said :

Emotionally speaking, without pumpkin and Zhu Qi (the two founders)'s shrimp, it is already over. In the end, streaming music is just a bargaining chip for capital to fight with gods, and has nothing to do with music.

After the announcement of the closure, Xiami also announced in an official statement, "Welcome more musicians to join Yinluo."

According to the trademark information disclosed by the Trademark Office of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, "Yinluo" may focus on short video and audio related directions.

It can be seen that Ali Music still has not given up on the road of music. Xiami Music's future may also shift to more music business scene services.

This is also a microcosm of China's online music market.

The online music platform is no longer a simple listening software, but an online entertainment platform.

It has to fight against various entertainment industries such as games, variety shows, and short videos. It needs to broaden its monetization channels, carry out content incubation, and continue to respond to new changes and continue to introduce new business changes.

▲In December 2018, Tencent Music was listed on the NYSE

According to data from the third-party research organization QuestMobile , in June last year, the number of active users of online music apps reached 655 million. Mass users also need mass content to support.

So it can be seen that Kuwo Music has begun to deploy radio dramas and audiobooks, QQ Music has begun to promote podcasts, and Tencent Music has also cooperated with China Reading Group to turn original content IP into subscription long audio; Netease Cloud Music announced that it will cooperate with Dou Audio cooperation, try to explore the "short video + music" ecosystem…

▲ Several superstar concerts during the QQ Music epidemic