QQ Music VS Netease Cloud, the next battlefield is in the community.

Text | Letter from Houchang Village by | Meiya

At the beginning of 2018, the country stopped fighting, and Tencent Music and Netease Cloud authorized each other’s music works, reaching more than 99% of their exclusive music works.For users, they finally don’t have to travel around to listen to a few favorite songs. For the platform, the era of relying on copyright to build a moat has quietly gone, and the music battle will continue. It’s time to tell some other stories.

Recently, many users have complained that Netease cloud and QQ music are becoming more and more difficult to use. When you want to hear a song in Netease cloud, you need toMy favorite music, recently played song list, creation song list, collection song list, collection album, and private FM.There are so many options to choose from.

After the final selection, let’s calm down and listen to the children’s songs. An icon will appear in the upper right corner, suggesting that you watch the live broadcast crazily. In the lower right corner, we sincerely invite you to listen with friends.

Click into the song comment area, there are not many hot comments related to the song itself, but there are many late-night story meetings. Every poet in the comment area can also see advertisements for treating acne by scribbling a few casually, and they are also madly implanted in the form of comments. I have turned over several songs in a row, and there are acne advertisements implanted. Perhaps the users in the comment area are still in adolescence.

The QQ music next door is not much better. In the newly joined plop community, users can choose topic groups to post news freely. The first few pages of the recommendation group are popular traffic stars. Unlike Netease Cloud Village, the fans’ support club in plop community has stronger attributes.

Comparing Netease Cloud Village with Plop Community, a double-column information flow mode with Little Red Book requires users to click on it actively, and the information transmitted on the home page is less, which has the advantage of being more concise. At the same time, users also have a stronger choice of content. The information flow in Plop Community is similar to brushing a circle of friends, and users can only brush it without thinking to see if they can brush some interesting content.

At present, the plop community has done quite badly in some details. Various label symbols have increased the threshold for reading information, and the messages posted by users are not even aligned at both ends. The uneven arrangement is a bit obsessive-compulsive, and the recently played music bar will also block the line of sight at the bottom of the page, forcing the rhythm of obsessive-compulsive in minutes.

Aside from the design problems, the plop community often brushes the dynamics that have nothing to do with music, and whoever is lovelorn, who is married and who is cold war again.From this point of view, QQ music is gradually moving closer to Netease Cloud.

Most users listen to songs just to listen to songs, and they don’t want to socialize while listening to songs, and they are even less interested in watching live broadcasts on music apps. Some users in Zhihu commented that Netease Cloud and QQ music are two pieces of shit that are constantly stinking, which makes people gradually adapt to such music apps and gradually forget what the pure music listening ecology is like.

Users who are tired of music apps with complicated functions will think, why can’t domestic music listening software be like spotify? Simple function, refreshing interface,Don’t engage in live social networking, honestly make products and earn some money from paying members, isn’t it good?

But business does not think so.

No matter how much Netease CEO Ding Lei talks about his ideal about music, it still can’t change the fact that starting a company is not about charity, but about making money. If you can make a grand narrative while making money, that’s good. If not, it’s still important to make money.

If you want to make money, you have to occupy more market share or increase the payment rate of users.

Tencent Music Q1′ s financial report shows that Tencent Music (QQ Music, Cool Dog Music, Cool Me Music) has a monthly activity of 657 million, up only 0.5% year-on-year and down 2% month-on-month. Netease Cloud announced the latest monthly activity of 165 million.The monthly number of online music in China is 710 million, which has almost been divided by Tencent Music and Netease Cloud.

The world is divided into two parts. Netease Cloud and QQ Music think the same thing.How to snatch users from each other and how to make every user contribute the greatest value.

How to rob users from each other? The simplest point is that if the other party has it, I will have it.

When you do live broadcast, there will be a group of anchors running to your place to live broadcast, and correspondingly there will be a group of people watching live broadcast, who will spend more time in your product, which I don’t want to see, so I will do it. You have supported a group of musicians, and if they are unfortunately popular, the traffic will tilt to you again, which is what I don’t want to see, so I will try my best to support musicians, and so will other actions.

After exchanging copyrights, it is difficult for both parties to rely on content to crush the other party, and it is necessary to start to differentiate. Now, it seems that both parties can’t tolerate each other’s specialities, so the music listening software is gradually becoming more and more complicated.

In addition, the platform should be just right. The 2020Q1 financial report shows that,Spotify, a foreign music streaming giant, has a monthly income of 286 million and 130 million paying users.This is a 45% payment rate, in contrast,Tencent Music’s subscription rate is only 6.5%.There is still a lot of room for improvement.

The simplest and most rude way to make more people pay to become subscription members is to make the experience of ordinary users listening to songs worse, including not listening to the songs they want to listen to, advertising bombing, inserting advertisements into music and so on.

Some time ago, QQ Music tried to insert advertisements while users were listening to songs. This is a test of Spotify mode. Spotify will insert audio promotion when non-member users listen to songs. However, Spotify’s rules are clear, and it will broadcast an advertisement for no more than 10 seconds every 15 minutes. If you choose to watch a movie advertisement for 60 seconds at a time, you can get an hour of listening to songs without advertisements.

Spotify has a large number of free music libraries, and users have been clearly informed of the advertising rules, so after weighing, users either choose to become paying users or accept advertisements every 15 minutes, and there is nothing particularly controversial.

The reason why QQ music commercials are embarrassing is that you didn’t provide me with quality services, full-screen advertising, live broadcast, social interaction, and APP are like telephone poles covered with small flyers.I’ve put up with this, and now you’re going to ruin my listening experience and force me to pay. Of course, users are unhappy.

The platform is also very innocent. The green diamond costs 15 yuan a month, and Spotify members pay 10 yuan a month. QQ music just randomly inserts advertisements, and Spotify will insert advertisements every 15 minutes when listening to songs. How can it be scolded?

This is a natural contradiction between the platform and users. Users should have a better experience, and the platform should pay for members, so that users can experience the inconvenience of non-members and tell them that membership will be better. But you can’t do it all at once, or users will think that your whole platform is rubbish, so you have to grasp the middle degree.

Compared with placing advertisements, which will obviously hurt users, adding some functional areas secretly is annoying, but not so annoying. It is very expensive for users to change their music listening software. It is very troublesome to change from Netease Cloud to QQ music, and all songs have to be collected and synchronized again.

Therefore, users can’t bear it, and they are too lazy to change places to listen to songs. This gives Netease Cloud and QQ music opportunities. They are eyeing original musicians, and the cost is not high. If it is on fire, the waist copyright will become the head copyright. Moreover, the influence of supporting original musicians on ordinary users is very subtle, and people will only feel vaguely that the quality of songs pushed by Japan is getting lower and lower, more and more new faces appear in the recommendation places, and they seem to know nothing about the music trend.

More original music can open the ceiling of music content. At one end of the platform, we signed up potential original singers, promised them how much exposure and how much play, and quietly added the songs of these singers to your daily tweet. You listened to two songs that you didn’t like so much, and the musicians were happy and the platform was happy.

Besides supporting musicians, it is also a good idea to be a community.It shifts the cost of linking users from the platform to the users themselves, and cultivates people’s habit of reading comments and making dynamic comments when listening to songs. If they happen to meet the same hobby in the community, users will be more sticky to the products.

And for people who just want to listen to music simply. Although joining the community function will greatly affect the conciseness of the page, as long as you are not blind, it is not much different from the previous experience of listening to songs, even if some of them offend users.Anyway, Netease Cloud and QQ music are becoming more and more similar. If you escape to another APP to listen to songs, you can’t escape the music community.

Therefore, doing things like community can make people who like it like it very much. People who don’t like it are annoying, but they are helpless. And these people who like community will have higher stickiness and stronger willingness to pay. The user value of these people is far higher than that of users who stay because of copyright.

For community products, the content is core competitiveness.In recent years, comments on Netease Cloud songs have become more and more sad in spring and autumn, and they are full of Osamu Dazai-style mourning words, which makes Netease Cloud get the nickname of "suppressing the cloud by the net". People are tired of seeing the words piled up with moans, and they hope that the comment area can return to focusing on the music itself. It is not an easy proposition for Netease Cloud to change the content tonality of the platform UGC.

The plop community of QQ music starts with rice circles, doing the business of fan economy, and by the way, see if we can build a community covering music, film and television, life and other fields.This entry point is quite good. Although fans used to list Aidou on Weibo, Post Bar and other platforms, from the attribute point of view, music APP+ fan gathering place is obviously more suitable, which can provide a refined channel for fans and reduce the cost of information transmission between users.

At present, the content form of plop community is not mature, and there is still a big gap between the community atmosphere and Netease cloud.However, from the recent actions of QQ Music and Netease Cloud, it is not difficult to see the determination of both parties to make efforts in the community.

It’s just that no matter who wins or loses, for ordinary users, an increasingly bloated music listening software has a high probability of escaping.