Chapter 1406 Global Layout of Paid Music

Li Mu attaches great importance to matters related to co-branded headphones, so Muye Technology got in touch with two German companies, Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic, on the same day, vaguely revealing that Muye Technology intends to customize more than one million pairs from their companies. The intention of high-end headphones, the two companies responded to Makino Technology in the shortest time, showing their admiration for Makino Technology, a great Internet company, and their expectations for cooperation with Makino Technology.

Therefore, Fang Xudong temporarily transferred four directional R&D personnel from the hardware laboratory, and together with the business team of Makino Technology, he was ready to leave for Germany.

Before the team set off, Li Mu held a small meeting with them. On the one hand, he wished them a smooth journey and a successful completion of the task. On the other hand, he reiterated to everyone the core goal of this custom earphone plan.

The coquettish operation of customizing co-branded headphones is the first of its kind in all kinds of music-based electronic products in the world.

Li Mu hopes to enhance the sound quality of the Mango-ME2 and its cost-effectiveness in the eyes of consumers through the joint cooperation with the headphone manufacturer. The core gap with competing products is that customized earphones are not sold separately, so if consumers are interested in this unique earphone, the only channel is to buy a Mango-ME2, or buy a Mango-ME2 from the user of the Mango-ME2. buy in.

However, Li Mu is not going to match all Mango-ME2 with a custom earphone like this. He plans to divide each model of Mango-ME2 into two versions, one is the normal version, the other is the deluxe version, the normal version It is paired with the original ordinary earphones of Mango-ME, and the deluxe version is paired with the future co-branded custom earphones.

The reason for the distinction is mainly because the increase in cost indicates that the price of the terminal will also increase, and in many developing countries and regions, including Huaxia, the purchasing power of consumers is generally insufficient, so the Mango-ME2 for custom headphones is added. It may add a lot of burden to ordinary consumers, so it is necessary to give them a cheaper option.

At present, domestic music lovers rarely buy high-end players and headphones. For most consumers who use MP3 to listen to songs, most of them are using earbuds with a price of less than 50 yuan, and more people use them. The headset does not exceed 20 yuan. Similarly, the sales of expensive iPods in China are also very general. Most consumers who like music are not even willing to spend a few hundred yuan to buy an MP3, which can easily cost thousands or even thousands of yuan. iPod, in the mainland is only the choice of very few high-end players.

But in western developed countries, the sales of high-end players such as iPod are still very amazing. The price of a few hundred dollars is not a lot of money for music lovers in developed countries, and the iPod has a simple design and huge storage. Space, excellent sound quality, and high-end style are very attractive to these consumers who can afford it.

but,

Even for an Apple iPod, its hardware cost is mainly concentrated in the fuselage itself, and the quality of the matching earphones is relatively average, and the sound quality is not outstanding.

The Mango-ME2 with co-branded custom headphones has been added. The main goal is to compete head-on with the iPod in its target market. At that time, the co-branded custom headphones will become an important part of Mango-ME2's crushing of the iPod in terms of sound quality. It will take a long time window to catch up.

If Apple finds out that the Mango-ME2, which uses custom-made earphones co-branded with well-known manufacturers, is much ahead of the iPod in terms of sound quality, there are only two ways for Apple to deal with it. If the price of iPod is reduced to zero profit or even extremely low profit, then Apple will kill its own money. Therefore, the only effective way for Apple to deal with it is to catch up.

However, it is not so easy to catch up in terms of hardware. First of all, Li Mu can be sure that Apple does not have its own headphone production line. If it wants to upgrade Apple headphones, then what it can do is to entrust a company that makes headphones for them. Upgrading is not something that can be done in a few days. Even if it is rushed, it will take at least a few weeks.

Moreover, upgrading headphones means an increase in overall cost for Apple. If Apple passes this additional cost on to consumers, the price disadvantage of the iPod will increase. Part of the cost, then its profit margins will be greatly affected.

Again, at this stage, Li Mu can lose money to buy and sell players, but at this stage Apple can't. This is its Achilles heel!

...

The small team that went to Germany set off, and Li Mu had to make the final preparations for the launch of YYtunes. The most important thing was to finally confirm the payment process and payment channels of YYtunes.

In countries and regions with strong overseas copyright protection, the popularity of paying for music is very high, but the traditional payment method is to buy genuine physical albums, whether it is tapes, CDs, MDs, Apple's itunes just started to try online this year. Paying for music is a little effective now, but after all, it has just started and is immature, so YYtunes has a great chance of catching up.

Due to the high popularity of Muye Technology in the world, and the number of users is the first in the Internet field, YYtunes is very attractive to record companies, so Muye Technology is much more attractive to record companies than just starting an online music store. Apple, when Makino Technology contacted these record companies, hoping to get their authorization to sell music online and share profits with them, almost no record company refused to cooperate. Compared with Apple, some record companies are still In the stage of hesitation and wait-and-see, so, before YYtunes is launched, its copyright library has surpassed that of Apple, which has just started.

At present, YYtunes has obtained the copyright authorization of most of the world's record companies, and has fully digitized these music. At the same time, according to Li Mu's request, the technicians have stored three different versions in YYtunes' own database. Each version is divided based on sound quality, namely: Standard, Higher, Extreme.

YYtunes sells music in two ways: download purchases and monthly purchases.

In YYtunes, the download of singles and albums needs to be purchased separately, and for online audition, you only need to pay a fixed monthly fee, and online audition does not need to pay for individual songs, only monthly payment With a certain amount of money, you can become a member of YYtunes and listen to any song in the music library online for free.

Like itunes, YYtunes also takes a 3:7 profit share with the record company. For example, if a song is priced at $0.99 for download, each song is paid to download, and the record company will take $0.69 and put Most of the profits go to the record companies, in order to bring more digital copyright revenue to the record companies, thereby increasing the overall scale of the music industry.

The monthly subscription is based on the logic of "playing accounts" designed by Li Mu. For example, the monthly subscription fee of YYtunes is US$9.9. In June this year, 10 million users subscribed monthly, and the monthly revenue in June was US$99 million. According to 3: The distribution ratio of 7, of which the total amount to be distributed to the record company is 69.3 million US dollars, and at the beginning of July, the platform will calculate the number of monthly subscriptions in June. For example, the entire platform has 10 million monthly subscription users. In the past 6 months, a total of one billion plays have been generated, so divide the $69.3 million allocated to the record company by one billion plays to calculate the revenue share that should be given to the record company for a single play.

Based on this calculation, the monthly subscription account for a single play is $0.069. If a record company authorizes a total of 20,000 songs and the 20,000 songs are played 2 million times in June, the company will receive $138,600 in June. If a popular singer’s single is played 10 million times in June, then just the share of this single in one month can reach 690,000 US dollars.

This set of settlement logic of "split accounts for the number of plays" has been recognized by all record companies. They were originally worried that the distribution of monthly income would be uneven and unfair, but based on this set of settlement logic, they don't have to worry at all. .

Li Mu did all this not only to snipe Apple, but also to support the development of the music industry, which stemmed from his absolute respect for creation and intellectual property.

In order to enhance the promotion of the music industry, Li Mu also specially opened the path for independent musicians to apply for residency in YYtunes. If an independent musician wants to sell his music through YYtunes, he can apply for a musician account in the background and upload his own music. After the music content is reviewed, his songs will be listed on YYtunes, and independent musicians can increase their income by selling music on YYtunes.

The lives of most original singers are very embarrassing, not only in the mainland, but all over the world. For an original singer who has no company packaging and no financial support, if he wants to record an original song, he must first complete the lyrics and song creation, and then Try to arrange the music, or pay someone to arrange the music. After the arrangement is completed, you will also pay to hire professional musicians to record the accompaniment for yourself, such as guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and other instrumental music, harmony, and the musicians can make up After that, a sum of money is paid to rent a recording studio, which is recorded in the studio, post-processed, and then recorded into a record. Many original singers go bankrupt after recording a song, let alone recording an entire album.

For such musicians, what they need most is a channel to monetize their music. Otherwise, when their creations are not rewarded, it will be difficult for them to continue to stick to their music path, and it is very likely that they will say goodbye to music. And the songs that he could have created will be stillborn. No one knows how much fun a guy who sits in front of a computer writing code, or a guy who brushes dishes in a restaurant, can bring to the masses if he embarks on the road of music. music.

However, for these people, it is too difficult to realize the traditional form of music. He can only achieve it by signing a contract with a record company. Now, they can realize rapid realization through YYtunes. Moreover, YYtunes will rely on YY's strong traffic in the future. , must be able to become an opportunity platform for original musicians to go from grassroots to popular.

However, these charging methods, in the first stage of YYtunes' launch, are only implemented in economically developed or copyright-protected countries and regions, which are mainly Western developed countries, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Therefore, the current payment channel adopted by YYtunes is based on PayPal, which is settled in US dollars, followed by VISA and Master-Card's respective credit card electronic payment channels. Although Alipay is also connected to YYtunes, Li Mu estimates that Alipay will basically not have it. How many users use it is mainly because he knows in his heart that it is impossible to expect Chinese netizens to pay for online music at this stage.

In Huaxia, YYtunes was launched under the name of "YY Music", and the first phase of the launch was completely free.

The reason why it is completely free is because Li Mu knows that if YY Music is forcibly charged in China, then basically the ending will be one: death, and it will die very quickly.

Domestic intellectual property protection is still far from the level of eradicating piracy, and even the crackdown on piracy is only at the stage of scratching the itch. More importantly, domestic users are currently deeply ingrained in the concept that online music should be free. Possesses toll soil.

Regarding this, Li Mu himself is very helpless, but there is no effective way, so he can only free first, let users accept free genuine music, and then implement paid music when the market and legal conditions allow it in the future.

In order to make the record company willing to provide free online audition and download to Chinese users in China, Li Mu specially added several advertisement sections in YY Music. In the future, these advertisements will all be used to target medium and large enterprises with sufficient social credit. For paid advertising, all advertising revenue will be used to subsidize record companies. At that time, the dual mode of "playing times and downloading times" will be adopted to distribute advertising costs to major record companies fairly and equitably.

Advertising revenue is naturally much less than paid revenue. These record companies also know that in this way, they will not be able to share too much money. At least the revenue scale lacks imagination, but if you look at the problem from another dimension, everything will suddenly become clear. .

After all, there is no record company in the world that can earn digital copyright income in China, especially in mainland China, and the income of music products is also pitiful due to the strong impact of piracy. Therefore, if they do not agree to Li Mu's cooperation plan, their music They will still be auditioned and downloaded on Huaxia's network, and no one will give them a dime. At least Li Mu will use all the advertising revenue to subsidize them. Who will be troubled by money?

At this stage, Apple's iTunes only has a music payment business in the United States. They are now at the stage of crossing the river by feeling the stones. According to the trajectory of historical development, they will expand this business to the United Kingdom next year, and then gradually expand. To more countries, however, for Muye Technology, with the support of global products such as YY, and a global data processing center that has been built, YYtunes can be used in North America and Western Europe in the first stage of its launch. , Australia, and Japan and South Korea have launched paid services simultaneously. This speed is absolutely second-kill for Apple at this stage.