Is short music far from long audio? With internet fiction, it’s not far off.
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “Hedgehog Commune” (ID: ciweigongshe) author: Jia Xuan.
Have you thought about it. Besides listening to songs, QQ music can also listen to your favorite web articles?
In March, Reading Group and Tencent Music signed a five-year cooperation agreement to jointly develop and produce audio books and interview programs, increase the realization of online literature, and open up Tencent Music’s long audio market.
Web audiobooks are not new, and there are giants in the long audio market. Tencent Music is an expert in short music, and it still needs to be tested on the road of audio frequency. And the in-depth cultivation of reading in the web industry will provide it with important support.
From “Partner” to “Competitor”
From the perspective of derived costs, audiobooks are the “first stop” of Nettext IP operations.
Compared to comics, games, and film and television dramas, the production threshold for “audiobooks” is lower and it is easier to put them into the market and test them. The works of Reading’s works have a long creative period. Generally, they have been vocalized since the serialization of works, and have been launched on various platforms.
In fact, reading has long been laid out in the field of “audio books”. Since 2008, the founding team has started audio production of audio novels. In 2010, it acquired Tianfang Listening Book. In 2015, it invested in Himalayan FM and Lazy Listening. Established an audio-reading brand “reading and listening” in 2018.
“Reading Listening Books” on the Himalayan platform
When the “Reading and Listening Book” brand was established, Zhu Jing, vice president of Reading and Reading Group, said: “We use the Reading and Listening Book brand to express this massive portfolio of works and open cooperation with various mobile audio apps on the market Relationship, there is no competition. “
However, in March of this year, Reading and Tencent Music teamed up to use Internet literature as an entry point to open up Tencent Music’s long audio market. The past open cooperation relationships began to have some “powder flavor”.
According to the financial report data recently published by Reading, the online business revenue of Reading in 2019 has declined, a year-on-year decrease of 3.1%. The copyright operation performance was relatively good, up 341% year-on-year. Such dataPerformance, let the industry show two voices on the future development of reading.
In terms of revenue from copyright operations, the IP operation of reading articles has been steadily advancing and quite effective. The appearance of the explosion “Qing Yu Nian” gave the industry’s male IP video film adaptation a booster.
But from the perspective of “paying for reading”, the foundation of the text industry, the ceiling of the web industry has not been broken. Under the background that it is difficult to reduce the loss of piracy, free reading shocks the market, and the rise of entertainment methods such as short videos, the number of users of the web text platform has reached the upper limit, and the web text needs to “break the circle” and attract new users to join.
The audiobook market is exactly a blue ocean. And in the blue ocean, there are always “wolves around.”
The special report on China’s audiobook market in 2018 shows that from 2016 to 2018, the average annual compound growth rate of the audiobook market size was 34.8%, and its market size increased from 2.37 billion yuan in 2016 to 4.54 billion yuan in 2018. It is expected to exceed 7.8 billion yuan by 2020.
Photo Source: Ai Media Consulting
This forecast is also in line with the general trend of the global audiobook market. In December 2019, the British “The Times” reported on Deloitte’s annual technology and media trend forecast report as the source. The global audiobook market will grow by 25% in 2020, reaching nearly 4 billion pounds, or about 36.3 billion yuan. . The United States is currently the world’s largest audiobook market, and by 2023 audiobook sales will exceed e-books.
Neither the content provider nor the audio service platform will abandon this “gold mine”, not to mention that online novels and audiobooks themselves have a natural link attribute.
In the past, people talked about the supremacy between Himalayan, Litchi, and Dragonfly FM.
According to the “2018 China Mobile Audio Market Annual Comprehensive Analysis Report” released by Analysys, Himalayan owns 70% of the best-selling books in the market, 85% of the right to adapt the online literature, and 6600+ original English best-selling audiobooks. The huge amount of genuine resources has accumulated a large number of users for Himalayan, which is an important factor for its rapid growth and has made it invincible for a long time.
The long audio format of the music platform is mostly presented in a single radio column, which is generally produced spontaneously by users with uneven quality. This time, Tencent Music is the first to break this boundary and break into the sound market by redefining the “ear economy”.