Introduction: I do n’t know if you have had this experience: when you hang out in H & M or Zara stores, you will suddenly be filled The sense of melody attracted, and then on the mobile phone crazy search for keywords such as “H & M background music”, “Uniqlo song list”. Although background music is often just an auxiliary means to enhance the atmosphere, for many consumers, music is actually an important way to help them build a brand impression. Recently, Ms. Jie specifically chatted with multiple music service providers to see how many screening steps a store playlist needs to go through before it can finally be “listed.”
This article is from WeChat public account: Ms. T-shirt (ID: teedevil2018) < span class = "text-remarks">, author: Huang Shan
“Today, Uniqlo ’s song is so good. I jumped the whole fitting room and found it at home. I was intoxicated.” Lin Shan said happily to Ms Jie
On the weekend just after the isolation of the new crown epidemic, Lin Shan rushed into Uniqlo and went shopping for an afternoon. As a result, while buying a large bag of new clothes, she also harvested a nice song that she had not heard before.
When she arrived home, she opened NetEase Cloud Music. In a user-created song list called “Uniqlo song list total (added in the summer of March 20)”, she found the song that happened.
You may not have thought about it. When shopping, you can collect music by the way. This is a shopping experience that many consumers have had.
Du Siyao lived in Spain for several years. “I remember when I went shopping, I couldn’t help listening to the song.” ZARA is a national brand in Spain, and its stores have also been collected by Du Siyao in those years.An important source of songs in foreign languages such as Spanish.
It is true that nowadays, when you open popular music streaming platforms in China, such as NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music, you will always find many user-built brand store playlists, including H & M, ZARA, Gap, Uniqlo fashion brand.
Fashion brands are actually music wholesalers
How did fashion brand stores become popular music distribution centers?
Behind these fashion brands, there is often a professional team providing in-store music solutions, and this team is usually a third-party enterprise music service provider / span>. In layman’s terms, such service providers play the role of music agency intermediary.
In the music industry, retail store music (in-store music) belongs to the background music segment, this type of company is mainly for corporate customers Provide music wholesale service.
At present, this type of music service providers that are more famous in the global background music market include Sound Suit in Europe, MOOD MEDIA in the United States, and USEN Group in Japan.
“We have been working with the third-party company USEN, and it is responsible for the issue of music licensing.” Niko and …, a Japanese lifestyle collection store brand, told Ms. Jie.
The USEN Group, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a fairly established music service provider. Founded in 1961, USEN provides subscription music playback services for many public spaces such as restaurants, shopping malls, and corporate offices.
niko and … in a shop in Nagoya, Japan
niko and … theme city life music festival held in Tokyo, Japan
This type of service provider represents the copyright and distribution of upstream music creators, while creating a style “music package” for downstream brand retailers.
This requires such music service providers to customize store music plans for brand retailers in one step, including arranging music style positioning based on brand consumer groups.
Usually, such a service team needs to be equipped with a post like “music editor” to judge, select, arrange and properly edit music according to the customer’s situation.
Not only that, some more professional agents also provide so-called “one-stop music solutions”, in addition to providing style music packages, but also provide overall retail store audio management and other work.
Fang Zhou told Ms. Jie, “Because retail stores have many details in the implementation process, in addition to receiving music packages and playing, they also have to control the audio hardware and volume level. These things are very convenient if unified. Many services will Based on SONOS (Home Smart Audio System) or developedControl system on Pad. “Fang has served as a music show host for a well-known domestic music FM for many years. He is also a researcher in popular music at the University of Liverpool.
In essence, these corporate music service providers are music agency wholesalers, and brand retailers are the distribution channels for these music. The only difference from the music label that authorizes KFC, Starbucks, and Uniqlo to advertise songs is, “Many of the film and television licenses talk about specific tracks. Environmental music is generally ‘True Wholesale’.”
Customized brand store “Music Pack”
Specifically at the practical level, the brand store style music package is mainly a customized service for brand style and positioning, including music style, type, sound volume, music library update frequency and other aspects.
niko and … This Japanese-style grocery store sells a wide range of products, consumers also have a large age span, and it has a high national level in Japan. niko and … tells Ms. Jie, “We hope to bring customers a better shopping mood with background music. In the choice of specific music, we will choose music that has no strong sound but is not too soft.” < / p>
The brands of the Spanish fast fashion group Inditex have different positioning, and their store music styles are also different.
For example, younger brands like Bershka and Pull & Bear tend to choose fast-paced store music; the elegant style of Massimo Dutti targets mid-to-high-end, and the music selected by the brand’s stores is also more elegant.
Swedish fast-fashion brand H & M also chose fast-paced songs. Not only that, H & M told Ms. Jie that her brand store selections often refer to popular music charts such as Billboard’s music.
Academia’s research on the influence of music on consumer behavior has beenFor many years, music genre, rhythm and volume have been generally regarded as three important factors that affect consumer behavior.
Careful consumers may have discovered that if the store music of a particular brand changes significantly in style, volume, or rhythm, they often notice it immediately.
“Environmental music is like a” slip “, most people can only perceive the degree of” that tone “, which is very general.” Fang Zhou told Ms. Jie, “But as long as it is changed or wrong, It ’s easy to be noticed. “
Background music is often highly functional in fast fashion stores. For example, ZARA may turn up the volume too much during the promotional season, because loud volume will urge consumers to speed up their pace.
Another example, some fast fashion brands always like to put high-frequency electronic music in the store, because their rhythm often has the effect of simulating and accelerating the heartbeat, prompting people to make decisions as soon as possible. Middle-aged and elderly people can’t stand such fast-paced music.
niko and … choose different store music at three different time periods in the morning, middle and evening to let customers feel different shopping atmospheres.
Fashion brand retailers often also need to ensure the unity of music in stores in the global market.
H & M currently has more than 4,500 stores worldwide. The brand told Ms. Jie that the music played by all regional market stores must be downloaded from the internal music library created by the headquarters.
H & M’s internal music library also always maintains a certain update frequency, which is also to ensure popularity. “If the song that is broadcast in the store is a popular song three years ago, your clothes will be outdated.”
The brand enters streaming media for community music broadcasting
Now, global head music streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music have joinedAn army of corporate music services.
Ms. Jie sees that H & M, Nike, Pull & Bear and other apparel brands have all set up official accounts on Spotify, and they also have their own store playlists.
The most popular songlist created by H & M ’s Spotify official account is “H & M Store Music” (H & M Music in Store) , with more than 61,000 fans Pcs.
Spotify will feed back the music playback data on the platform to H & M. In an internal company blog post shared with Ms. Jie, H & M summarized the 6 most popular songs on the “H & M Store Music” song list so far in 2020 through Spotify feedback data.
Through this background data capture, H & M can provide more accurate selection guide suggestions for stores in various regions of the world.
In turn, Spotify has become a social social platform for H & M to interact with consumers. In another internal blog post, H & M suggested to employees: “If customers ask you about our store music, you can always suggest them to find it in our Spotify playlist.”
Of course, what fashion brands value is Spotify ’s big data algorithms, which helps the brand to accurately market. Known for its excellent algorithms, Spotify is currently the world ’s largest music streaming platform, with 100 million subscribers worldwide. These users spend more than 30% of their listening time on user-built music lists.
Spotify is a good choice for fast fashion and sports brands; these brands are particularly closely related to the popular music industry, and music playlists can become sound representatives of these brands.
H & M has developed the marketing event “H & M Music” in recent years, that is, cross-border cooperation with young musicians to promote online and offline activities related to music.
At present, H & M has collaborated with 4 new music talents including Alfie Templeman, IDER, Millie Turner and Gabrielle Aplin to provide offline concerts for brand members. These musicians also incubated special song lists for “H & M Store Music” on Spotify.
H & M Music and singer cooperation page
Nike goes further on Spotify. The brand has entered the Spotify platform under the name “Nike + Run Club” and has more than 1.3 million followers. There are as many as 20 song lists created by this account, and the theme song lists cover several popular “Nike Run Club”, “long-distance running”, and “speed running”. These song lists each have more than 60,000 fans.
In fact, there are three other official accounts registered by Nike on Spotify, namely “NikeWomen”, “Nike + Training Club” and “Nike Football”. As the name implies, Nike can be differentiated for different user groups and created a unique song list.
However, foreign brands have little cooperation with domestic music streaming media, at least there is no operation to open an official account on the bright side.
Ms. Jie saw on NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music are brand store playlists spontaneously organized by individual users.
The reason for this is partly related to the fact that the domestic music streaming platform has not revealed the development trend of enterprise-side business. Fang Zhou told Ms. Jie: “Compared with copyright sales, they still want to use the number of users to speak, or become part of music production.”
On the other hand, for brands, music still mainly depends on the impact of consumer behavior in the physical store scene, but from the perspective of showing brand tonality, store music is only one of the auxiliary tools and does not play a decisive role. .
“Localization of music is not as efficient as using local music spokespersons.”
Like you can see the huge outdoor advertisement shot by Calvin Klein’s spokesperson Zhang Yixing, but I’m afraid I can’t hear the song that Zhang Yixing sings in the store.
This article is from WeChat public account: Ms. T-shirt (ID: teedevil2018) < span class = "text-remarks">, author: Huang Shan