“There was a visual China, there is VFineMusic today”
“There is a visual China, there is VFineMusic”
“Don’t catch something and go to the visual China. The main problem in Visual China is to sell copyrights that are not owned by it. VFINE is the right thing to help musicians defend their rights. It is not a matter of nature. The word is used.”
VFine’s commentary seems to reflect the two perspectives of the “MCN commercial music infringement first case”.
At the beginning of the month, the Beijing Internet Court made the first-instance judgment: “The defendant papitube company constituted infringement, and compensated the plaintiff copyright party VFine Music and the musician Lullatone for a loss of 4,000 yuan and a reasonable expenditure of 3,000 yuan, totaling 7,000 yuan.”
But the dispute did not calm down.
VFine stated that it will continue to appeal around the amount of infringement and the cost of safeguards. A video before the Mid-Autumn Festival of the @Bigger Institute involved in the case, but also revealed some “things of the matter” while apologizing, which led to VFineMusic’s “lawyer’s letter warning”, and the incident was once again pushed to the forefront:
VFine is also unambiguous. At the same time as the lawyer’s letter was issued on the morning of September 19th, “the tribute” to the Bigger Institute, VFine Vice President Chen Xin responded to the “things of the matter” mentioned in the former video by short video:
In order to facilitate the understanding of the cause and effect, we combine the two videos to draw a key point for everyone (multi-image warning):
Disputation 1: Is papi sauce pulled down by VFine Music?
The opening of the Bigger Institute said, “Because my popularity is not big, the other party is still pulling my boss papi sauce pa teacher into the water”:
VFine Music responds to “No one is pulling the water, not even searching Weibo”, and emphasizes that all documents in the external are always expressed as “papitube blogger Bigger Institute infringement”
In our opinion, VFine Music’s position is more tenable.
We reviewed the video of Lullatone’s authorized VFine proxy rights protection, which is indeed the “short video MCN agency papitube blogger @Bigger Institute”:
The media that reported the outcome of the court’s decision also used the expression “papitube company”.Did not mention papi sauce himself:
More about the hot search mentioned by the Bigger Institute.
Hot search is not commercialized, VFine obviously does not have the energy to shake it; for the people who eat melon, “papitube” as the MCN organization, the popularity is far less than its boss papi sauce, unlike the latter flow. The host of this hot search is actually @新浪科技:
Dispute 2: Bigger Research has not actively addressed infringement issues
The Bigger Institute mentioned in the video that VFine did not “provide a solid and complete evidence” in the previous reconciliation, proving that “the license of the song is owned”, they “really want to compensate the real master.” Up”:
But in VFine’s response video, it was clearly stated that it got the license agreement in December last year, but it was not possible to communicate with the Bigger Institute until the case was filed in April this year.
In 4 months, no matter whether you hire a lawyer to conduct an authorization review or request further improvement of the authorization materials, there should be no difficulty.
Even with the authorization, other details in the VFine video reflect the lack of sincerity at the Bigger Institute. In the four trials of the first instance, the defendant raised a number of questions:
For example, trying to prove that “Walking on the Sidewalk” was co-authored by the husband and wife group Lullatone. Although VFine was authorized by Lullatone’s CEO and Lullatone’s husband, Simon, it could not prove that Mrs. Simon also supported this rights.
A worthwhile detail is that the Bigger Institute’s apology video, even the title of the song is wrong, it is hard to believe that the Bigger Institute has tried to resolve copyright disputes.
Another contradiction is the paradox. Why does VFine classify Visual China into one category?
This is from the Bigger Institute mentioned in the video, VFine “provided a private settlement of 80,000 yuan before the trial, provided that the former “to spend more than 100,000 to buy their music library.” p>
It seems that it is the bundled sales trick that Visual China is good at.
VFine responds to bundled sales, and the Bigger Institute first proposed “Can you solve this problem through cooperation?” However, while VFine provides a cooperative solution, it has always emphasized “case by case” and insisted on a settlement amount of at least 88,000 yuan. The Bigger Institute did not accept it and finally went to legal proceedings.
In other words, the Bigger Institute had hoped to establish a cooperation to avoid the settlement costs, but VFine insisted on resolving the limits of infringement, which was finally in court.
According to our media reports, VFine’s issuance and management are actually two independent business departments. “Rejecting bundle sales” has also been written into their “three principles of rights protection”:
As for what is the reason for launching the second trial with Visual China, Chen Xin responded with an intuitive data: In its annual income of 30 million, the rights of rights accounted for less than 5%:
In other words, VFine may starve to death if it is to protect the family.
Dispute three: How to calculate 88,000 yuan
bluntly After VFine was bundled, the Bigger Institute clearly showed in the video that it intended to generate “88,000 compensation too high”. In the video, he took the opportunity to popularize the knowledge of commercial music copyright. For example, the price of copyright transactions is too high:
Also, short videos often require multiple BGMs, meaning copyright fees may be sky-high:
Also indicates that the current music copyright transaction lacks a “reasonable charging mechanism” and “transparent rules”:
So it seems that 88,000 yuan seems to be a sky-high price.
However, VFine’s video pointed out that this 88,000 is actually the “package price” of 7 infringing videos.
With a total of 20 million+ of the total playback volume, it only takes less than 0.005 yuan per play. VFine also gave a calculation logic of 88,000 yuan with a Lullatone combination of $1500/head authorization:
Therefore, the actual amount of compensation is less than 13,000 yuan per video. If the compensation part and the rights protection cost are excluded, each video will be less than 8,000 yuan according to the cooperative price. But the Bigger Institute’s publication is 290,000 yuan:
Chen Xin further mentioned that the average price of VFine volume licensing does not actually exceed 800 yuan. Obviously, it is much lower than the “10 songs of one or two thousand dollars” mentioned by the Bigger Institute:
In fact, more than half of the Bigger Institutes have been infringed, but more than half of them have had friendly negotiations with VFine and settled:
This further indicates that for the Bigger Institute, which can give 290,000 copies, 800 pieces don’t seem to be as affordable as the ones in the video.
It is not difficult to see that the Bigger Institute, as a content producer, is not only weak in copyright awareness, but even has a tendency to push the copyright trading industry to the opposite side of public opinion with its own influence on the C side.
It is not difficult to understand why VFine chose to continue appealing.
In fact, the “MCN commercial music infringement first case” is only a microcosm, and the back is the commercial music copyright is in the initial stage of difficulties.
As the 12 words summarized by VFine: Infringement is easy, rights are difficult to defend; high cost and low compensation.
In this case, for example, its compensation of 7,000 yuan is far from covering the infringement loss and rights protection costs. The jazz musician @Posheri used an image of his own music production equipment to make an image analogy: “The amount of compensation for 7,000 yuan is placed in the picture below, which is a dust.”
What caused such a disparity? Where should the strategy of breaking the deal come from? We may wish to use this dispute as an entry point to talk about the status quo and trends of the commercial music copyright trading industry.
At the public level, the perception of music copyright may be more to switch back and forth between multiple apps in order to listen to the song, but the war of this dispute comes from another market – synchronous income. It usually refers to the income earned by licensing music to movies, TV shows, commercials, games, and more,
From the perspective of music business model, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) divides music revenue into five categories:
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Physical Record/CD Revenue (Physical)
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Performance Income
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Download/Digital Purchase Revenue (Digital)
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Streaming revenue (Stream, including ad-sponsored streaming and paid streaming)
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Synchronize Income
As can be seen from the 2019 Global Music Industry Report published by IFPI, these five categories of income distribution are not average:
Entities, streaming media, etc. have taken the bulk, with synchronous revenue accounting for only 2%. But in contrast, it is its great potential for development. The growth rate of 5.2% for the whole year is on the same level as the income of digital income and performance rights:
It is not difficult to understand that the income of the entity is shrinking. Why does the synchronous income gradually increase slowly?
First, the To C market is approaching the ceiling;
According to iResearch’s 2019 China Digital Music Commercial Copyright Market Research Report, both the growth of the music copyright market and the growth rate of digital music platform users’ paid income have gradually slowed down:
This stems from two aspects.
On the one hand, very high awareness of streaming media;
According to data released last year by IFPI, China has become the world’s most used streaming media with 89% of its data. As of August last year, the number of online music users in China has reached 550 million.
It plans to acquire a 10% stake in Universal Music; previously, Ting Caijun, the new vice president of TME and head of the copyright management department, is also a music solutions company.
To B’s music copyright trading business has taken off in any way.
There is a classic judgment in the industry for the industry: “The upper body of the Internet, the lower body of traditional music” how to make the lower body also changed the name of the Internet, has become the consensus.
In fact, in the “MCN commercial music infringement first case”, many problems in the copyright transaction mentioned by the Bigger Institute do exist, which is an important trend in the commercialization process of digital music copyright:
1. Squeeze the distribution system bubble
Expensive, is the primary problem facing the industry.
On the one hand, the unreasonable pricing of traditional buyout authorizations;
The data shows that in 2013-2016, the growth rate of the music distribution system will be 100%; in the three years from 2017 to 2020, the growth rate will slow down to 30%~50%; and after 2021, increase The speed will drop to 5%.
This stems from the fact that the current licensing model is dominated by a one-year or permanent one-time buyout. A hammer sale means that the copyright party tends to be as expensive as possible to reduce the risk.
On the other hand, information asymmetry in traditional transactions can easily be used as a premium tool;
Chen Xin gave an example in the video: A game company was given 800,000 quotes when it purchased the “Bei Le Pure Land” through domestic agents. VFine found the upstream copyright party, and 40W won the global one-year license.
It’s not hard to see that the root cause of the failure of the new model is the lack of trust.
Taobao’s early growth was weak, and the birth of Alipay was ushered in. For music copyright transactions, third parties are also required to reduce information asymmetry and reduce the unnecessary cost caused by lack of trust through a targeted customization cooperation model.
For example, V.Fine has achieved a simple and cheap commercial music legalization by clicking on the effect billing and interest stratification modes. It has become a long-term cooperation with Tencent Advertising, Jingdong, Baidu, Byte Beat, and Fast Hand. Partner; and similar to the second, Kai uncleThe Bigger Institute’s peers have also worked with them for 2 years:
2. “Decentralization” Refactoring Revenue Distribution