In the business world, there are no eternal enemies, only eternal interests.

You can finally hear a variety of music styles besides Divine Comedy and Canned Laughter at the New Year’s House. You may finally have Jay Chou, Li Zongsheng and Zhao Lei. Earlier, it was reported exclusively that Jiuyin has reached a music copyright authorization cooperation with Tencent . Recently, Kuaishou has also reached sublicense cooperation with Tencent Music.

According to sources close to the two sides, the contact between the two parties can be traced back as early as the second half of 2018, and product-level research and development contacts began in the first half of 2019. Currently, the library has been docked.

“Learning Cats”, “Paper Short Love”, “Taking You To Travel” … More and more songs have become popular from Douyin, even if they were already before the explosion of BGM Debuted on Netease Cloud Music or QQ Music. However, the disadvantage of the explosion model is that many users’ impressions of short video apps, especially the vibrato, are stuck on a few magic songs that can hear ears.

But it is also thanks to the explosion of Divine Comedy that short videos such as Douyin fast can grow quickly. According to the latest data, Douyin DAU has exceeded 400 million, and fast hands have also achieved the impact of 300 million DAU at the beginning of the year. The goal. The background of the viral BGM spread on the short video platform is that more and more users are willing to choose this form to share content. Moreover, the gesture dance extended by the explosion of Divine Comedy caused the national carnival. After the stars such as Chen He and Guan Xiaotong also joined the wave, the short video platform also launched a series of activities.

Today, Douyin Kuaishou ’s strategy of penetrating users through “Broken Divine Comedy + Content” has also matured. The next thing to do is to continue to expand the content category, knowledge, technology, fashion, cars … but this is inseparable Open more rich genres for matching.

Because of this, Douyin and Tencent have reached a cooperation. To get more users, Douyin is far from enough. It also needs to use the power of idol songs such as Jay Chou and Lin Junjie to penetrate different circles. And Tencent Music also values ​​its ability to serve as a music distribution entrance and diversion ability. BGM is just a song segment. Users who want to listen to the complete song will eventually have to stream back to the media music platform.

So, the combination of headline and Tencent has attracted attention again not because of drooling wars, nor because of a one-dollar lawsuit against each other, but because of actual cooperation. Earlier, Tencent had requested a claim for Douyin’s “unfair competition and affecting Tencent’s reputation”, and Douyin had also been dissatisfied with Tencent’s external chain blocking strategy and initiated a lawsuit.

However, the rare cooperation reached between the headline department and the Tencent department is also related to the relatively independent development of Tencent Music in the Tencent department.

Long-term Tencent music

“Are you not afraid to be popular with Douyin?” This is the question most people in the industry have heard after Douyin and Tencent Music reached a music copyright sub-licensing cooperation, helping to make the music very strong. In fact, it also buried an invisible “bomb” for Tencent Music.

With the increasingly fierce competition among users, the crisis of content platforms is everywhere. Even if one is a short video platform and one is a streaming music platform, it seems that they belong to different tracks and are not direct competitors of each other. But in the final analysis, the two sides are competing for user time in different dimensions. Open QQ music to listen to the song or brush will vibrato, this is a thing that cannot be taken into account at the same time.

Tencent Music also has reservations in the cooperation. Informed sources told that Tencent Music will also provide some exclusive resources to Weishi. As the biological son of Tencent, although Weishi has not been promoted to the first camp of the short video track, it has also been loved by Tencent. During the Spring Festival in 2020, Douyin gave up 2 billion coins, quickly issued 1 billion Spring Festival Evening Red Envelopes, and Weishibo also threw 1 billion. In the matter of “throwing money”, Weishi never missed. Recently, even Ma Huateng also took out the circle of friends resources as the Weishi platform. In the early morning of January 20, Ma Huateng sent a video red envelope through his Weishi account and forwarded the short video to himself Circle of friends.

However, Microvision’s performance has not been satisfactory. In August last year, Caijing reported that Tencent has devoted almost half of its group resources to support since the reopening of Weishi, but it has only achieved a record of 7.5 million daily activities in a year and a half. Weishi is currently unable to take on the heavy task of fighting for the length of users. In order to contain the vibrato, Tencent has chosen a fast team. This can also be reflected in the cooperation between Tencent Music and short video. The sublicense cooperation between Tencent Music and Quick Hand must be achieved before Douyin, and sources familiar with the matter said that the scale of its authorization is also larger than Douyin.

This is a win-win cooperation. Tencent Music has more traffic distribution portals. More importantly, the short video platform can also help users to use the Tencent Music Copyright Library. Tencent Music will also receive a copyright distribution income in the short term, but this is only a small part. Some investment analysts said that copyright itself is expensive and profits are not that high. From Tencent Music’s financial report, it can be seen that the income including digital albums, advertising, and distribution is in the revenueThe proportion is only about 14%.

Tencent Music values ​​long-term benefits.

When users are used to using Jay Chou and Hua Chenyu’s songs as background music on short video platforms, the advantage of pricing power will be in the hands of Tencent Music. In the future, the short video platform can abandon this part of the copyright, but it will also face the crisis of user loss. The copyright storm of Jay Chou experienced by the streaming music platform before is a good example.

Secretively vibrato

Dou Yin is secretly fighting for more copyright. It profoundly understands the importance of BGM to the platform, and also tasted the regrets that many BGMs have been lost due to the negligence of music copyright. The song “Wind the Wind”, which was originally widely circulated on the vibrato, has now Not searchable on Douyin.

Dou Yin also wanted to bypass the intermediate distributors and record companies to negotiate the copyright database, but was caught in a divergence of licensing terms. Some people in the industry have analyzed that the feature of the Douyin short video platform is that you only need to obtain the copyright of the song clips, but foreign record companies do not know the short video clearly. The short video platform is not compatible with the streaming music platform. Compare them. In addition, to obtain the copyright of the record company also has to pay a lot of economic costs.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in April 2019, the cooperation between ByteDance and Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music will expire one after another. Such cooperation also stems from the acquisition of musical.ly.

In China, record companies are also seeking cooperation with Douyin Short Video. Some record companies told me that in the future, when signing exclusive agreements with platforms such as QQ Music, they are also fighting to retain the rights to some song clips. In their opinion, it is very easy to sing a song on the vibrato, uploading the chorus part of 30 seconds, the rhythm is bright, and the lyrics are catchy. As long as someone shares it, it will get good results, especially the big V Others use it to achieve widespread spread.

Before that, the record company also will use other branches to sign licensing agreements with Douyin. People at the record company told me that for their uploading song clips on the short video platform, the streaming music platform also adopted a tacit attitude, and neither party wanted to miss the vibrato position.

The headline also clearly understands that upstream record companies and streaming media platforms only value the “diversion” function of the vibrato. How to form a closed loop of traffic is the headline thinking. Therefore, after the short video push song, Toutiao is also making its own streaming music platform. In October 2019, Byte Beat was launchedSince the music streaming platform “Music Gang”, its music library are all popular tremolo songs.

Earlier, the Financial Times reported that ByteDance will launch an overseas-oriented music streaming platform. According to the company ’s plan, the application will take the lead in India, Emerging markets such as Indonesia and Brazil went online, and then expanded to European and American markets such as the United States. The headline ambitions are obvious when it comes to making music streaming.

Proactively expand the content of the operation by winning more copyrights, The methodologies accumulated through the operation can be used to make more popular songs and explore more forms of conversion. Which idol and what kind of song does the user like? The operational data that is deposited is the value of Douyin.

In the business world, cooperation and competition are only temporary.