Rewinding music, Tencent music and cloud music all need more thought.

Wen | Entertainment Business Observation Tehran

According to the consulting report, the online music market in China will increase by 33.1% year-on-year to 32.2 billion yuan in 2023, and it is expected to reach 49.5 billion yuan in 2025, and the corresponding social and entertainment industries derived from music are expected to exceed 110 billion yuan.

China’s online music market is growing into one of the hot market targets that attract worldwide attention and focus on watching. What’s more, Netease Cloud Music, as one of the two leading platforms, completed a gorgeous turn last year.

According to the financial report, Netease Cloud Music climbed out of the quagmire with a loss of over 9 billion yuan in five years, and turned losses into profits for the first time in 2023, and achieved a profit of 734 million yuan from a loss of 221 million yuan in 2022, and the gross profit margin increased significantly from 14.38% to 26.73%.

However, the spring breeze is still mixed with the coldness and chill of winter.

On the one hand, the profit of Netease Cloud Music has a lot of luck factors, including the restriction of exclusive copyright at the policy level, which makes the authorized price of music in the market return to rationality and the higher interest rate of US dollar deposit, which also indicates from another side that there is uncertainty in the future of the online music business that has become the core.

On the other hand, as I predicted in the second quarter of last year, Tencent Music was slightly overwhelmed by the income of social entertainment services that continued to decline.

In 2023, Tencent Music’s revenue from social entertainment services and other businesses decreased by 34.2% year-on-year to 10.43 billion yuan, while the Group’s annual revenue in 2023 decreased by 2.1% year-on-year to 27.75 billion yuan.

The initial heart of retiring music

It’s not just Tencent Music.

Faced with the pressure of strong supervision and content rectification from the policy side, it was the consensus of the entire online music market last year to actively shrink and transform the social entertainment service business, including Netease Cloud Music.

According to the financial report, in 2023, the revenue of Netease Cloud Music decreased by 12.5% year-on-year to 7.867 billion yuan, of which the revenue of social entertainment services and other businesses decreased by 33.6% year-on-year to 3.516 billion yuan, and its proportion in total revenue fell from 59% in 2022 to 44.7%.

Not only that, although the number of monthly paying users of this business increased by 20.3% year-on-year to 1.6 million, the monthly income per paying user dropped from 326 yuan in 2022 to 178.6 yuan.

The shift of business focus will inevitably lead to "pain", and from the perspective of financial indicators and user data, Tencent Music is in an advantageous position in the new competition driven by social live broadcast to music members’ payment.

In 2023, the total revenue of Tencent Music was about 3.5 times that of Netease Cloud Music, and its net profit was about 8.5 times. In terms of "revenue pillar"-online music service revenue, Netease Cloud Music (accounting for 55.3%) increased by 17.6% year-on-year to 4.35 billion yuan, and Tencent Music (accounting for 62.3%) increased by 38.8% year-on-year to 17.33 billion yuan, nearly four times that of Netease Cloud Music.

In terms of user data, in 2023, the number of monthly active users of Netease Cloud Music online music service increased by 8.7% year-on-year to 206 million, and the number of monthly paying users increased by 15.3% year-on-year to 44.12 million. Benefiting from this, the membership income of the platform increased by 20.2% to 3.65 billion yuan compared with 2022.

It seems to be thriving, but in fact it is under a lot of pressure.

Compared with the data released by the platform in the first half of 2023, the number of monthly active users of online music service of Netease Cloud Music basically stood still in the second half of the year, and the number of monthly paid users only increased by 2.37 million, and the monthly income per paid user did not change much year-on-year, only from 6.6 yuan to 6.9 yuan.

On the other hand, although the number of monthly users of online music of Tencent Music decreased by 4.2% year-on-year to 576 million, the average monthly income of a single paying user increased for seven consecutive quarters, reaching RMB 10.7 by the end of 2023. At the same time, the number of online music paying users increased by 20.6% year-on-year to 106.7 million, reaching a new high.

Behind a rise and a fall

The formation of the gap is traceable, and the most obvious one is undoubtedly the income of paying users.

According to the consulting data, the number of online music users in China in 2023 was 744 million, with a year-on-year increase of only 3.7%. Among them, users accounted for 54% after 90 and 00.

The scale of paid members of online music service is growing close to the ceiling, and it is difficult to have explosive growth. However, for overseas music platforms such as Spotify, the membership payment space of Tencent Music and Netease Cloud Music is still considerable.

Tencent Music is indeed making efforts in this direction.

At the beginning of December last year, QQ Music recently sent a "reminder on the price change of renewal service" to WeChat users, announcing that from 0: 00 on January 9 this year, the automatic renewal price of QQ Music Green Diamond Deluxe Edition members will all be brought to 15 yuan/month.

Two price increases during the year, and Netease Cloud Music reduced the price of platform student members to 5 yuan/month shortly after the official announcement of the second price increase. Tencent Music’s move not only made QQ music members lose their price advantage, but also caused themselves to fall into a word-of-mouth crisis, and was criticized by many users on social platforms for "eating ugly".

For this result, Tencent Music can’t be unexpected. After all, as early as 2022, Tencent Video, which belongs to the Tencent Department, also attracted a "squeaky sound" because of the continuous price increase of its members during the year, and even led to the loss of its members.

Tencent’s financial report shows that the number of paid members of the platform decreased by 2.4% year-on-year and 1.6% quarter-on-quarter in Q2 2022 when Tencent Video announced the second price increase.

However, there are priorities. Between the overall revenue trend and the maintenance of membership scale, Tencent Music must give priority to the burning eyebrows.

Coincidentally, Netease Cloud Music is doing the opposite, and it is also trying to make online music services provoke a heavier burden.

Compared with Tencent Music, which has entered the scale of 100 million paying users, the penetration rate of Netease Cloud Music still has room for further improvement. The platform also stressed after the announcement of the financial report that this year, it will further focus on scale growth, steadily enhance the profitability of the platform, and promote the ecological and healthy development of Yuncun.

On this basis, like all industries, the choice of young people also determines the future of the music market. At present, in order to cope with the rising cost of living and economic pressure, more and more young people begin to downgrade their consumption and pay more and more attention to cost performance.

Therefore, not only playing "low-priced cards", Netease Cloud Music has really put a lot of thought into meeting the personalized needs of users and improving the quality of platform services.

In January this year, Netease Cloud Music App officially announced a new revision, and released an open letter to users on the same day, apologizing to users for a large number of problems unrelated to music in the past, and at the same time, by changing the brand Slogan back to the 2013 version-"Discover good music", emphasizing that the new version will return to its original heart.

It is worth mentioning that QQ Music also has student members, and the platform clearly emphasizes that "student members are not affected" when the price is raised for the second time.

However, compared with Netease Cloud Music, the student members of QQ Music also have no price advantage, but the age setting range is wider, supporting users aged 13-24 (inclusive), and the benefits are more diversified.

Hard work may not be rewarded

"Fortunately, I didn’t follow the experience", "I thought I entered QQ music", "It’s cumbersome and I always make mistakes", "Change the soup without changing the medicine" …

Netease Cloud Music showed sincerity, but not all users bought it. To sum up, the official propaganda is just a slogan, which even destroys the experience of some users. At the same time, the advertisement does not seem to have a "-1 point". Many users will suddenly pop up advertisements on the homepage of the song when they feedback.

On the other side of the story, we are asking for higher prices to increase Tencent music, and we have not fully figured out how to persuade users to pay for the increased expenses.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, although the year-on-year growth rate of online music service revenue of Tencent Music rebounded, there was still a significant gap compared with 47.6% in the second quarter of last year.

With the extension of this idea, the profitability of Tencent Music is rising, and it is not all due to online music.

According to the financial report, in 2023, the operating cost of Tencent Music decreased by 8.2% year-on-year, and the total operating expenses decreased by 9.7% year-on-year, among which the sales and marketing expenses continued to drop by 21.6% year-on-year.

No matter how well the payment habits are cultivated, the price increase will still provoke the most sensitive nerves of users. On the other hand, although it is the present situation and will be the long-term trend in the future that the number of young people who spend cautiously and flock to the low-price belt increases, what they value is the low price with quality and value.

In other words, it is not a long-term solution to innovate at low prices and increase prices and income. The real competition between the two companies returning to music is to improve the user experience and service quality on the basis of continuously enriching the basic resource of copyright and build their own core competitiveness.

Both Tencent Music and Netease Cloud Music need continuous thinking and exploration on how to be practical and excellent. While the blade continues to move inward, the two companies must also be alert to market encroachment from the outside.

According to the 2023bilibili Music Ecology Report, in 2023, more than 152 million people watched music videos in bilibili, and the total number of broadcasts exceeded 57.3 billion times. In 2023, the number of video contributors to bilibili music scene doubled, and the total number of submissions soared by 189% year-on-year; In the whole year, the big coffee musician ×UP main cross-border planning exceeded 100 times, and the live music activities cooperated over 1100 times; More than 1,500 global star singers have settled in bilibili, and nearly 30,000 new MV songs have been launched.

On the other hand, according to QuestMobile’s data, ByteDance’s "Soda Music" is the fastest growing digital music product in 2023, with a monthly activity of 40 million in the third quarter, an increase of 400%. In response, before the press release, the APP has captured more than 30 million downloads on iOS, occupying the TOP1 of the AppStore music free app list.

Regarding the repeatedly mentioned AI, we can easily feel the determination and persistence of the two companies from the financial report.

The problem is that from the current reality, neither the embracing logic of Tencent Music’s enhanced interactive experience nor Netease Cloud Music’s playing from the ecological advantages of the community has aroused much splash at the user end.

Things change, rivers and lakes float and sink.

For Tencent Music and Netease Cloud Music, music can’t completely act as an antidote to anxiety for the time being. And how far it will go to embrace AI is full of unknowns and possibilities.