All of our current efforts to address copyright reforms are moving towards the blueprint for the world’s greatest music market.
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Author: Ants
Production: New Technology Knowledge
A summer of ten years ago, I used a handwritten song to go to the small commodity wholesale market to burn VCD music discs. A VCD is priced at 10 yuan, and 17 songs can be recorded, and that is my monthly pocket money. For families without a network, this was the only way to freely choose to listen to popular songs.
Impressive is the burning process: like the dumplings, the boss skillfully imported the songs such as “Seeking Buddha”, “Autumn is not coming back”, “Lilac”, “Two butterflies” and so on. More than ten minutes, a VCD disk with a solid cover will be handed to me.
It turns out that the quality of the recorded disc is difficult to look directly at: Liu Jialiang’s “Who do you really love”, the original MV has male and female starring to participate in the recording, and the burning version of the MV has no actors throughout, more like a nighttime video captured by the driving recorder Tang Lei’s “Lilac” MV takes the scene of the draft game, the whole process is a fixed lens, and the picture is dark, unable to see the singer’s face. When the song is still in the climax passage, the singer in the picture has left the microphone to thank the audience, and the human brain hurts.
In the wild age of digital music, this kind of foundry is densely distributed throughout the city. Their computers are like oil guns at gas stations, which can quickly fill the user’s CD or MP3. It is convinced that original singers must not be able to obtain copyright revenue from this widespread and fragmented communication. The singer Gao Jin once complained to the Beijing Business Daily: Regardless of the people or the media, the music is regarded as entertainment rather than commodities, which is the root cause of the sluggish music market.
Today, the burning disc business is almost extinct, but the music copyright issue behind it still exists. Contrary to a decade ago, the copyright party has changed from a victim to a main attacker, and among the infringers named, Papi Sauce and Fontimo are the first to bear the brunt.
Among them, the former was claimed to be 257,000 yuan for the use of the song “WalkingOn the Sidewalk” by the company of its shareholder in the short video advertisement; the latter was invited by the netizen to broadcast a “Lover’s Heart” during the live broadcast, and It was saved in the public video library by the live broadcast platform, resulting in the platform being claimed by the copyright party for more than 40,000 yuan.
Because visual China’s foresight is in the forefront, plus the two exchanges of fire, the copyrighters have shot two live birds with short video and short video, which has to be taken seriously.”Hearing China” has the potential to return to the rivers and lakes. This is a sign that the copyright balance began to tilt towards the copyright party after more than a decade of piracy eating the dividends.
Discover pirated essays
“Today, Internet pirated music accounts for almost 100% of the market, and we have lost the last position to reproduce music based on music copyright revenue. The industry is dying, brain drain, dreams are shattered, and dignity is nothing.”
——《To the Music Industry Tongren Book
The birth of copyright was originally the result of compromises after the parties weighed the interests.
Before the 18th century, in order to control speech, the British handed over the publishing and printing market to the monopoly of the “published trade unions” (hereinafter referred to as “the union”). There is no doubt that this trust-based union has taken most of its profits. This led to the excitement of the author community, who held the slogan and went to the government to protest. Under pressure, the British Parliament was forced to announce the collapse of the monopoly giant in the publishing industry and open up private publishers to enter the book market.
The collapsed union found that these swarming private capitals had copied their replicas with their own publications, and they had to fight a price war against them in the market, or they would face the risk of being eliminated. However, due to the long-term monopoly, the self-styled labor union operating costs remain high, which makes them retreat in the price war.
But the union came up with a solution: since it is impossible to beat the civilian publishing power in terms of cost, I can ask for parliamentary legislation to prohibit you from brainless imitation of my published works. This opinion is also welcomed by the writers: because the “civil war” of the publishing industry failed to bring income to the writers, writers urgently need institutional reforms to ensure their own benefits.
The two sides reached a consensus and put pressure on the parliament. By 1710, the British Parliament had once again compromised and introduced the law protecting the copyright of authors, the Anne Act, in the name of the then Queen. With the expansion of British colonialism around the world, this concept of copyright protection with British style spread to the entire English world.
Looking at the country, our copyright protection industry started late. In the era of planned economy, text, film and songs were positioned as promotional materials rather than commodities. The mission of the propaganda is to be as universally known as possible, and there is no hidden truth. It is impossible to protect copyright. In the early days of reform and opening up, cutting the cake basically gave way to making big cakes, and in the music market, it showed a special scene of “genuine and piracy flying together.”
To the new millennium, the era of accession to the WTO is imminent, and copyright protection in China has started in the fall. The exploration of the financial market is exactly the same: the speed of capital seeking growth exceeds the development of policy regulation, and the piracy tide of the music market has repeatedly proved this point.
This is an era that is extremely unfriendly to musicians: the public has a strong demand for high-quality music works. The value-added income represented by the mobile phone ring back tone business of a headpiece often reaches 10 million, but due to lack of policy BitThe vast value-added services were seized by millions of small companies, and the original authors and profits were basically missed.
On the other hand, there are no artists in Japan, such as variety and commercial performances, which have become large-scale in the country. This makes the sales of albums the key to the success of record companies and singers. Compared with South Korea, domestic record companies are incompetent “angel investors”: in order to ensure that the market does not change, the record companies are willing to take the star’s general works, but lack the patience to train new people. The vast majority of fledgling singers often get high investment in the first year, and once the album sales are not good, the second year is often faced with more than 50% of investment cuts.
On the other hand, the rapid rise of free music software has allowed users to adapt to the days of free music enjoyment. The “refueling party” that slammed the mp3 to record songs almost disappeared in the oppression of the scorn chain. In 2006, Baidu’s acquisition of thousands of listeners opened the first place in the industry’s centralization, and the major platforms began to compete in the market competition with the right to start.
Similar to the past in the UK publishing industry, the music platform provides users with completely free music services for competition, but does not pay royalties to the original author. The success of the music platform and the record company is based on the extreme suppression of the musicians. If Ding Lei’s expression is used, it is an era of “making music without making money”.
In addition to music, cultural publications such as text publishing and film and television have suffered from a significant loss of copyright revenue. Under the appearance of a few head musicians, the income of a large number of musicians is low, almost to the point where it is difficult to survive, and the industry is also facing the risk of no one else.
The 2011 Consumer Rights Day will be forever in the history of copyright protection: written by Murong Xuecun, Jia Pingwa, Liu Xinwu, Yan Lianke, Han Han, and Guo Jingming jointly signed the “Three-Five Chinese Writers Baidu Book” published on the whole network.
Only one day, the music industry released “Protest Baidu Open Letter.” On the 23rd of the month, it was released by the China Audio Association Record Working Committee, Gao Xiaosong, Zhang Yadong, Xiao Ke and others drafted “To the Music Industry Tongren Book.” In this incident, Han Han’s blog has a famous saying: “On your way to oil, please let us go.”
The slogan of the text and music industry is a product of the industry’s ecological decomposition and reconstruction. With this as a sign, the balance of the music market is back from the absolute advantage of users. Very few independent musicians and record companies and their contracted musicians are the main beneficiaries of this trend.
The network music platform model represented by everyday sound, Yinyuetai and QQ music was shocked: the old model of providing music free of charge was negated, and the positioning of these platforms was brought closer to the intermediary: to solve the problem of information asymmetry Efforts to exchange a certain amount of agency fees.
The problem is that the intermediary positioning undoubtedly challenges the user’s old payment habits, and the contradiction between the platform and the user’s original shelving rises to the surface. This also faintly occupies the hidden era of the exclusive copyright era, the user and the platform are completely opposite.
Exclusive copyright and historical reversing
The Internet industry is ultimately a service industry, and it is an industry that draws users. Copyright monopolies and strong capital can solve short-term problems, but they cannot solve long-term problems.
——Ding Lei
If you look through social media, you will find that users generally have a slogan about the “exclusive license” of the music platform that was launched in 2013: “When you wake up, QQ is gone for Mayday, and Shrimp has no Sun Yanzi.” In order to find the target song in the first time, the users made a song guide in the form of an Excel table to vent their helplessness.
Since the emergence of exclusive copyrights, users’ habits have been directly impacted: without a clear purpose of use, a singer’s mentality is nothing more than two: to alleviate negative emotions, or to extend positive emotions. The copyright of the singers distributed on each platform makes the user have to repeatedly check the platform of each song before enjoying the music. In a words that I know about netizens: “With this energy, I might as well work overtime.”
In 2013, Tencent, which won the “3Q War”, threw away the monopoly of the hat, and immediately began signing an exclusive music licensing agreement with major record companies. This market competition for Netease Cloud Music triggered a chain reaction, and the copyright battle for the head platform was rapidly emerging. The neck products such as Baidu Music and Yinyuetai were quickly opened, and the online music market entered the “oligarch era”.
The exclusive copyright competition is closely related to the user’s music consumption habits: In June 2016, ten Grammy Award winners Taylor Swift and Apple Music had a copyright dispute, which affected the domestic market: one time, all Taylor Swift’s songs are not payable on demand, and all major platforms are hot and hot, and the membership payment system is promoted. In order to attract users, a large number of exclusive copyright works were included in the head platform during this period.
The platform for mastering copyright is like holding a sword in the square, “squatting users, going up with peers.” Under the temptation of privilege, the copyright fee was raised to the sky-high price: in 2017, Universal Music’s copyright fee was only 3,000 US dollars. In the repeated competition of various platforms, Tencent finally got 350 million US dollars in cash and 190 million US dollars. The price, won the exclusive copyright of three years of Universal Music.
The era of copyright, the emergence of the head music platform in the horse-riding movement is another manifestation of the capital “survival desire” before the level of policy supervision. In 2015, the regulatory authorities issued the most stringent copyright order, which supports exclusive licensing of music from the policy side. In 2017, when the copyright competition was the most fierce, I talked about the heads of music products of BAT and Netease, asking all parties to cast swords as plows to prevent the industry from going to the “burning money-monopoly” pattern. On the other hand, it is to stop Tencent and Netease cloud endless litigation disputes.
Overall, the rationality of exclusive copyright has caused great controversy inside and outside the industry. Some people think thatThe Matthew effect brought by the exclusive copyright ended the era of the “Hundred Flowers” of the music platform and introduced the head platform into the endless burning battle. It not only violates the original meaning of the cultural works, but also easily repeats the mistakes of the American “trust era” and brings the whole industry into the self-enclosed monopoly abyss.
In the wild age of domestic music, VCD and tape dealers are accustomed to the sale of “masterpieces” and “mongju”. If you want to look at all the masterpieces in one go, you have to buy multiple discs. This is also optional burning. One of the reasons why the CD is all the rage. Nowadays, it is rare for users to realize the freedom of listening to songs through the Internet era, and they have to be forced to choose the side station by various platforms. In the meantime, the figure of monopoly capital flashed again.
In the eyes of users, the competition for exclusive copyright on each platform is more like a historical reversal.
Copyright and slaughter pigs
The court did not make too high a penalty for the two net red violations of music copyright: papi sauce and her Chunyu listened to the company was awarded 7,000 yuan, and Feng Timo’s betta live was awarded 3200 yuan.
In the outside world, the compensation of several thousand yuan is not worth mentioning. The key is the nature of the case: after the major online music platforms are settled, the copyright party extends the hands of rights protection to the long-lost third-party field. . Short video and webcasting are the two major disaster areas that use copyright-free music, and the evidence for illegal use of music is much more than that.
Strictly speaking, the use of unauthorized music in all online works is a matter of default. The only difference is that the copyright party’s willingness to slaughter pigs is strong or not. Nowadays, the two head stars are planted in copyright, which seems to confirm this concern: once the copyright party intends to harvest, the short video and live broadcast platform will instantly become the fat pork under the knife.
For this reason, the two cases, which are generally interpreted as the follow-up to the tide of music copyright, are the story of a lawsuit that forces third-party copyright awareness to awaken. This trend is almost unstoppable: in the courtroom, the two internally wrongly accused parties could hardly come up with a powerful counterattack. Among them, Chunyu heard that the company had to struggle with the plaintiff’s ownership of the copyright. Was beaten by the court.
The result of the judgment is worth pondering: once the industry consensus is formed, the live broadcast and short video fields will pay the copyright fees to the copyright party on a platform basis. The incident will be complicated: the anchors mostly eat talented food, but they can still retreat and put some unpopular things. Songs; once the music copyright of the short video platform is limited, then the “brain-washing” style that the platform relies on for survival may disappear overnight.
In order to survive, the short head video platform is easy to set foot on the old road of QQ Music and Netease Cloud. On the road are hundreds of millions of exclusive copyright fees and endless copyright lawsuits. If the fire of copyright is burned for four years in a short video, not only will the head platform be left behind, but it will also be pulled to a small number of small platforms to be buried.
But the road to music copyright is not without a solution. The use of music works by third-party platformsIn order to promote the promotion of the work itself. If the copyright party imposes high fees on such promotion, the result will be the decline of the popularity of its works. The high music copyright fees mainly come from the platform-to-market vicious competition. If the supervision side can guide in the competition process, the platform can obtain the music library with lower copyright fees, which is acceptable for all parties.
The crux of the problem
If you look at the industry, the popularity of copyright is the general trend, behind the historical process of commercialization of the cultural industry. All of our current efforts to address copyright reforms are moving towards the blueprint for the world’s greatest music market. The key to success is to keep the creative passion of newcomers. In the era when pirated music sings the protagonist, the Chinese music scene has fallen into a decade of cold winter.
According to the China Digital Music Industry Report of the Communication University of China, the size of the Chinese music market in the world ranked No. 12 in 2016, and digital music and streaming music ranked 9th and 7th in the world. Digital music in China accounts for 96% of the total, and digital music revenue ranks first in the world. The International Recording Association defines China as the next great global opportunity, perhaps in line with the world’s music market leader, the United States.
The great achievements of the Chinese music market are inseparable from the promotion of copyright protection. An important reason why the United States can create a pop music hall is the perfect legal guarantee: the Copyright Act 1976 provides protection for any author’s original works. Even if the original author has passed away for 70 years, the law still recognizes it. The work has copyright.
On the issue of original licensing, a number of US online music platforms, represented by Apple Music and Tidal, adopted an exclusive copyright model. In order to make up for the high agency fees for exclusive copyrights, exclusive agents often sell licenses to other platforms after the “single addiction”, forming an industry law of “first come to eat meat, then to drink soup”. As a compensation for the user’s habits. In fact, this is also another manifestation of China’s “piracy era”, in which various online platforms compete for the right to launch head works.
We have reason to believe that under the great determination of the regulator to balance the music market ecology, the exclusive copyright competition will return to rationality from the enthusiasm, and the basic rights of users to enjoy the work will be guaranteed. Under the circumstance of the era when Internet innovation is king, the online platform will also develop high-quality products from online to offline, to supplement the single profit model based on member payment, and let excellent musicians find a stage to show their talents.
The biggest crux of current Chinese music copyright protection lies in the improvement of copyright awareness among the whole people.
In 2012, Beijing Meili Star Company purchased the exclusive official copyright of “Leuge Song” in China from the Finnish copyright party. When the news came out, it caused the ridicule of the vast majority of netizens. Some commentators claimed that the move of the American music was to put a gold on the face of the dead skin. For a time, the purchase of genuine copyright by Meili became a “sweet joke.”
There was a lot of disappointment in the interview: “The vast majority of people are used to the ‘ignorance of copyright’ model, so now the company is proposing the importance of copyright, the purchase of copyright will It is not understood by netizens. If the public has been holding this attitude for a long time, the future of the recording industry will be even more worrying.”
This is undoubtedly a microcosm of the weak awareness of copyright among Chinese people. Behind it is the value of the Chinese people who have long been inclined to be weak in social conflicts. Towards a big point, this is also a subtle cultural tradition in which China and the West focus on substantive differences and procedural justice.
This is why we can not hesitate to unite and condemn the “copyright rumors” represented by visual China. In the face of copyrighted record companies, our opinions split. That is after a variety of routines of record companies and online platforms, a preconceived concept that allows us to naturally regard users as a vulnerable group, from the bottom of the heart to the feelings of compassion and shelter.
Just don’t forget, under the seemingly rich wings of the record company, there are countless small and specific musicians who mostly dream of music, risking the high elimination rate of the industry, and writing with the perseverance of ordinary people. works. They are just as part of a vulnerable group. We enjoy the music they produce, just like enjoying the chef’s cooking at the restaurant.
Although this kind of food has the qualities to be shared by the collective, it is not the reason why you eat the king’s meal because of the respect for the work of these musicians.