Wen | Shentong Commercial Chu Qingzhou
Hello, everyone, I am a green boat who loves listening to songs.
It is also the year-end inventory season of the Internet platform. On December 29th, the annual Netease Cloud Music Users’ Annual Listening Report was launched.
This is the seventh year since the beginning of 2017. I thought there might be seven years of itchy aesthetic fatigue, but after the report went online, the overall reputation was still very good.
Based on the feedback from users, I noticed three important changes in this year’s music listening report.
These changes, in fact, reflect the development and changes of the music platform itself, such as Netease Cloud Music, at the business level in recent years. According to this context, perhaps we can gain insight into the logic behind this IP screen at the end of each year.
Change 1: from carrying "personal emotions" to echoing "social emotions"
As the name implies, users’ annual report on listening to songs shows users’ personal memories of listening to songs, and personal emotions and emotions behind music, which is also the basis for the continued popularity of listening to songs in the past years.
However, I have observed that from last year to this year, listening to music reports have been based on this, and they have more echoes to the collective emotions of society.
For example, there are more concluding words in this year’s report, such as "your musical spirit"; For example, the mood of listening to songs in four seasons is extracted from the habit of listening to songs in four seasons.
On the surface, this is still a personal emotion. In fact, let’s look at these summarized words, such as "upward force", "no one is more elegant than you", "brilliant sunshine" and "childlike innocence in summer", which are all beautiful words and have the common expectations of most people.
From a certain point of view, Netease Cloud Music seems to reuse the H5 model method of "personality test" in the annual listening report.
Whether using the theory of type 24 personality and personality color before, or quoting the works of music psychologist John Sloboda in this report to present the relationship between music and emotion …
This is not so much a user’s individual "personalized" emotion as a collective and common emotional state of human beings.
Music can be a resonator of social emotions.
Take the World Cup as an example. Every time the World Cup comes, everyone’s first reaction may think of the two works "The Cup of Life" in 1998 and "Wow, Wow, Wow (African Moment)" in 2010. As soon as the music rings, fans will be immediately substituted into their original emotions.
This year’s World Cup also accidentally promoted "Good Morning Long Hui". On the short video platform, this song and the picture of Messi accepting the award became a perfect match.
Under the epidemic, everyone has actually been a little "mourning" recently. This year’s report on listening to songs, from copywriting to pictures and dynamic effects, is focused on taking a beautiful healing wind.
Comparatively speaking, Yuncun specially added an advertisement "Remember all the original music" last year to echo the public sentiment behind the frequent hot events that year.
This year’s idea is to better integrate social emotions with each individual’s emotions.
Change 2: the prominent "time" dimension in the expression of personal emotions.
In the presentation of "personal emotions", this year’s listening report has also added more dimensions. Frankly speaking, the content of communication is afraid of "complexity", because if it is not added well, it will easily become bloated and affect the communication effect.
However, on the whole, the data dimension added this year is still very clear in thinking. One of the outstanding points is that the data dimension around "time" is more prominent.
Part of this is the data that has been available every year in the past, such as the time when I first "met" the platform; What is your most special day of the year, when is the latest time to listen to music, and so on; Part of it is the data added in the past two years, such as "your habit of listening to songs in four seasons"; There are some new additions this year: for example, is your era of listening to music in the 1980s, 1990s or the new millennium, and so on.
Why am I so concerned about time? Because our musical memories are actually related to specific time and specific scenes.
Tayu Lo, the godfather of Chinese music, once specifically mentioned that "music is an art of time, and it must rely on time to prove that it really exists".
For ordinary users who listen to songs, grasping one more time dimension can arouse the emotional memory in a specific scene once more, and the display of emotions is of course more delicate.
Change 3: Why do you want to do "light socialization"?
If the first two points focus on big social emotions and small personal emotions respectively, then the function of "light social interaction" added to the music listening report should be directly related to the community attribute of the platform.
The so-called "light socialization" is mainly reflected in the last egg of this year: let users enter the "cloud empty" field, listen to songs with other online users, meditate on cyberspace, and welcome the New Year.
In fact, before Netease Cloud Music’s annual listening report, it also tried "social" gameplay, and there were disputes and discussions. However, this year’s report grasps the "atmosphere" of user communication, and I think the general direction is no problem.
Why do you say that? Because strangers socialize, there are actually two completely different emotional demands.
The first appeal is to pursue "simple and direct" efficiency. This is the demand that social products such as Momo and Exploration try to meet. However, this is not suitable for communication based on interest or musical taste.
The second emotional appeal of strangers’ communication, on the contrary, is "inefficient". The most typical case, such as the game "Light Encounter" created by Chen Xinghan, is called a social adventure game, but its socialization is an inefficient socialization, but users prefer this warm and warm atmosphere.
Another example is the "listen together" function created by Netease Cloud Music. After listening to songs together, you may never meet the opposite partner again, but the average daily use time of a single user is more than 2 hours, which proves that users highly recognize this communication method.
Inefficient socialization, like simple, direct and purposeful stranger socialization, reflects two aspects of human nature and is an emotional appeal of human nature.
This time, I tried to combine "emotional resonance" with "light socialization" and really found a suitable and warm gathering atmosphere for music.
Behind the change of annual music listening report, the morphological change of online music products
From the marketing point of view, this year’s annual listening report of Netease Cloud Music really reflects the team’s innovative ability; However, from the perspective of lower-level business logic, the changes in the content of listening to music reports in recent years are actually a silhouette of the changes in the form of Internet music products.
First of all, the music platform has changed from a "small and beautiful" product to a "daily use" mass product.
Under the comprehensive factors such as the ten-year development of the mobile Internet, the accelerated expansion of the car market and the rise of short videos, the importance of music products has not decreased, but increased.
On the one hand, the influence of the music platform continues to improve. For example, Netease Cloud Music, which was the first to open up the situation among young users in the first and second lines, has had 182 million monthly activities after years of development; On the other hand, Aauto Quicker music, soda music and other new forces have joined the game, which reflects the growing influence of the music market itself.
This is the premise why the music platform can move from bearing "individual emotions" to echoing "social emotions".
Although pop music is the most convenient carrier of cultural communication content, China’s music market has also experienced many years of lows in those years when piracy was rampant. Only when the volume of products and the influence of the music market have reached the whole people, can music really give full play to its potential value as a resonator of social emotions and a transmitter of the spirit of the times.
Secondly, the exploration of community product form by music platform has also entered a new stage.
Being a community is always the goal pursued by Internet content products, and the music platform is no exception. Whether it’s Yuncun, which is positioned as "music+social" as soon as it goes online, or platforms such as QQ music, which has been added in the past two years, it is exploring the form of community products.
Objectively speaking, Netease Cloud Music is a leader in exploring the community, and has made some new achievements in recent years.
The innovative modes such as "light social interaction" in this song listening report are actually based on the reference provided by functions such as "listening together": the proper communication and interaction mode between music lovers has been verified to some extent.
Standing at the mixed end of 2022, looking back at the seven years when listening to the song report accompanied us, it really makes people feel sad. In any case, Netease Cloud Music’s annual listening report has indeed become an annual inventory IP with the characteristics of the times.
What is more noteworthy is that music is also playing an increasingly important role in the competitive Internet market and our specific life scenes step by step, which is somewhat gratifying.
* deep pupil business (ID: deep-focus)
