Source of this article: Times Weekly Author: Tao Yajie
The first half of 2022 ended, and the online concert has been completely popular in the past six months, and there are constant hits. The former top artists have gained great attention, and the popularity of live broadcasts has also brought a wave of traffic to Tencent Video Account and Douyin.
On December 17, 2021, the number of viewers of the live concert of Xicheng Boys WeChat Video Account reached 27 million; on April 15, 2022, Cui Jian's first online concert attracted 46 million people to watch, with 120 million likes; on May 20 and 21, 2022, the video account screened two Jay Chou's former concerts, with a total of nearly 100 million viewers; on May 27, 2022, Luo Dayou and Stefanie Sun competed on two platforms, with a total of 40 million and 240 million viewers respectively; on June 24, 2022, the total number of audiences of the Backstreet Boys online concert reached 44.211 million; on July 3, 2022, the Beyond concert was re-released on Douyin, with a total of 140 million viewers. According to rough calculations, nearly 700 million people watched the 7 concerts in total.
A string of growing numbers symbolizes the arrival of the golden age of online concerts. "Jay Chou's concert was just a replay, but the click exceeded expectations, confirming the potential of the online concert." Li Yu, a middle-level member of a well-known domestic video platform, told the Times Weekly reporter.
Everything starts with nostalgia
Take Cui Jian’s first video number concert on April 15, 2022 as an example. It started at 8 pm. In less than half an hour, the number of viewers quickly increased from 10 million to 20 million.
Cui Jian, who is already 60 years old, sang 7 songs including "Left Behind", "Start Again" and "B-side of Time" on stage in one breath, and then he sang classic songs such as "The Girl in Flower House" in succession. When I returned to the show three hours later, the number of viewers exceeded 43 million and the number of likes exceeded 100 million.
When singing "The B-side of Time", the comment section was full of "I haven't changed at all". The lyrics turned into hot barrage to occupy the screen, and also ignited a retro grand event.
Since Cui Jian, fans Zhang Zhe have not missed almost every online concert. Living in a first-tier city, music became his place to release his anxiety. At night, on the balcony that is only 2 square meters, looking at the familiar melody and pictures on the screen, "I suddenly released my heart," said Zhang Zhe, a boy born in the 1980s, to the Times Weekly reporter. "What I listened to is not the song, but the youth that I used to be young, and I can't go back to."
Not only is nostalgic popular among the post-80s and post-90s girl Xiao Ran told reporters that her favorite singer is Jay Chou. Whenever she hears Jay Chou’s songs on campus radio in the evening, a warm current will surge in her heart. During the two nights of Jay Chou’s concert re-screening, she almost kept her feet guarding the screen, just to hear the familiar saying “It’s raining all night, and my love overflows like rain.”
Under the epidemic, people hope to find things they are familiar with, and online concerts just fit people's psychology, making the nostalgia wind blow continuously and become stronger and stronger.
The road to commercialization is difficult to follow
Whether it is offline or online concerts, artist expenses account for the majority.
Currently, the cost of mainstream offline concerts is more than 10 million yuan, in comparison, the expenditure of online concerts is much less, usually around 1 million yuan. Zhang Xinxuan, an analyst at the cultural consumption industry of iResearch, told the Times Weekly reporter, "The actual expenditure of the platform mainly depends on the amount of artists' expenses."
Li Yu revealed that the cost of live concerts mainly includes network fees, personnel fees, and hardware fees. The main part is still the cost of artists. The specific one depends on the artist's status, ranging from millions to tens of millions.
Since the beginning of this year, Li Yu's team has frequently negotiated with artists about online concerts. He said that artists usually pack a price and sell the project to the platform, commonly known as "bank". For the platform, the investment investment pressure of packages is high and often cannot be recruited. Therefore, another model is extended on this basis, called "paid bonus share", that is, the platform first pays a part of the artist's fees, and then divides the share based on subsequent commercial effects such as advertising and tickets.
Cui Jian’s online concert in April this year was named, exclusively named by Jihu Auto, and the Jihu brand was revealed throughout the process. The Da Zhangwei concert, which was held on June 18, chose to cooperate with Taote APP, and was hosted by Taote APP throughout the process.
"But now the advertisements are not easy to sell. In this situation this year, customers have become more cautious. After all, no one wants to lose money, so the platform still hopes to sell tickets at the same time." Li Yu said.
However, online ticket prices are always unsold offline. The Beijing News once conducted a small-scale survey on the willingness to charge for online concerts. The results showed that most respondents believed that online performances should be free, or the charging standard should not exceed 50 yuan. At the summer song conference held by Douyin live broadcast brand DOULive from August 3 to September 9, 2021, it tried to launch a paid viewing mode. The seven consecutive songs gathered well-known singers such as Zhang Huimei, Chen Li, Ouyang Nana, and Stefanie Sun, but the ticket price was only set at 6 to 30 yuan, among which Stefanie Sun's special show was free.
"If you are offline where you can get close to artists, the price you are willing to pay can be dozens of times higher than online." Li Yu sighed.
Zhang Xiaohui is a music enthusiast. She once spent thousands of yuan to fly to Hainan to watch the music festival, but she was unwilling to pay more than 30 yuan for online concerts. She told reporters that offline concerts will have irreplaceable charms, such as the immersion, connection and ritual feeling in the same time and space as her favorite singers.
is difficult to find customers and tickets are difficult to sell. In Li Yu's opinion, it is difficult to make money on a platform for an online concert.
TikTok and Tencent’s traffic battle
Even if you don’t make money overall, Tencent and Douyin are still rushing to do this business.
"Travel is money. Tencent wants to use the traffic of the video account to make subsequent monetization, and layout live sales, short videos and small yellow cars similar to Douyin, so it can accept a certain degree of losses. As for Douyin, it is also for traffic. After all, online concerts are very popular." Li Yu said that Tencent is spending money heavily at the concert, which has led to the increase in the costs of the entire industry.
Judging from the online concerts currently held by the two companies, Zhang Xinxuan pointed out that Tencent emphasizes a sense of professionalism and insists that every performance reaches the concert-level effect. In addition, "one-click forward to the circle of friends", "let friends see their likes", and "live room lyrics are the same", these convenient sharing and real-time interaction methods allow Tencent to reach a wider circle.
In contrast, Douyin strives to create a sense of interaction and companionship. On the Douyin platform's "How are you" concert on May 27, Stefanie Sun was in the "singing and chatting" mode throughout the whole process. On the night of the live broadcast, Stefanie Sun sang "The Rain Still Fallen Still", suites "Kite" and "I Miss Him So Much", and sang and chatted with netizens through live songs and letter reading.
Lan Lan, a fan who has been ecstatic to this performance, told reporters that Stefanie Sun interacted with the audience throughout the whole process, and what he said and the poems he recited made people feel very healing.
"Online concerts that are positioned in Douyin type live broadcast emphasize equality, companionship and reality, which is also the main theme pursued and demonstrated by Generation Z in the Internet world. With the normalization of online concerts and the changes in public awareness, Douyin online concerts may be held more prosperous." Zhang Xinxuan said.
Online will become a normal mode
Although Beyond concerts have attracted a lot of traffic, in fact, since the beginning of the online concert, the differences in traffic volume of different artists' concerts have existed for a long time.
There are also many online concerts that have not caused much splash. According to incomplete statistics from the reporter, Tencent Music Group has held hundreds of online concerts with different styles in the past two years, and there will be a large-scale performance every two weeks on average, but the real popularity started with the boys in Xicheng.
Zhang Xinxuan said that the decisive factor of all this actually does not lie in the platform, but in the singers invited. At present, the platform still uses traffic thinking to conduct online concerts, inviting superstars to perform online and rely on feelings and nostalgia to become popular. But in the long run, how to broaden the profit model with more outstanding and diverse content should also become a topic for the entire industry.
In addition to this, another question facing the platform is, as the epidemic eases, will online concerts that originated from the epidemic be short-lived?
Modern Sky once jointly created the "Strawberry Ranger" online concert with WeChat Video Account at the end of 2021, and also jointly launched the "Zhai Strawberry Music Festival" with Bilibili. But at present, for this largest record company in China, online projects may become a thing of the past.
"Our offline concerts have begun one after another. The online output has passed a stage before, and the plan has been temporarily on wireless recently." Modern Sky people told the Times Weekly reporter.
But in Zhang Xinxuan's opinion, the era of online concerts has arrived, which is a positive answer before the epidemic. The epidemic has stimulated the accelerated development of online concerts and changed the ecology of online concerts.
"Before the epidemic, online concerts can be regarded as extension and supplement to the scene; at the beginning of the epidemic, online concerts became a substitute for the scene; in the post-epidemic era, major platforms have strived to invest in the in-depth operation of online concerts and conduct comprehensive exploration of business models. It can be seen that online concerts have become their own and have become a normalized model." Zhang Xinxuan said.
(As the needs of the interviewees, Zhang Zhe, Li Yu, and Zhang Xiaohui are all pseudonyms)
