What software do you use to listen to songs?
Many people answered QQ Music, Kugou Music, NetEase Cloud and iTunes.
According to iiMedia Consulting's data, the number of monthly active users of QQ, Kugou, and Kuwo app ranks among the top three in the market. Tencent Music holds the two trump cards of QQ Music and Kugou Music, creating a huge music with 557 million monthly active users. Flow pool.
The Swedish music streaming platform Spotify has only 286 million monthly active users, less than half of Tencent Music, and its market value is twice that of Tencent Music (Tencent Music’s market value is only 26.338 billion U.S. dollars, while Spotify’s market value is as high as 48.397 billion U.S. dollars. ).
Spotify has 130 million paying users, with a payment rate as high as 45%, while Tencent Music has only 6.2%, while Apple iTunes has only half of both paying users and active users.
How is such a product that overwhelms Tencent Music and Apple iTunes created?
01
The main strategy is growth
Instead of maximizing income
Faced with a non-essential product, how should we promote it to users?
Too many entrepreneurs habitually come up with an introduction and talk about all the advantages, and they want you to pay immediately.
Looking at the report every month, the large amount of investment and extremely low transaction volume make people fall into contemplation. What went wrong?
Is it in bad condition? Is it inappropriate to wear? Or is the selling point of the product unclear?
Too many entrepreneurs are too eager for quick success and instant profit, and they can't wait to get the money out of the user's pocket immediately.
This phenomenon is common in the industry where Spotify was just established in 2008. At this time, iTunes has been around for 5 years, firmly occupying nearly 69% of the digital music sales in the United States. It stands to reason that Spotify has no chance of winning.
Unlike iTunes paying for each song separately, Spotify provides a free music library for all users, provided that users need to accept advertising pushes. This is truly unprecedented for the music industry in 2008, allowing many users to experience the "freedom of listening to songs".
"Our main strategy is to grow, not to maximize revenue."
As a new entrant in the industry, Spotify did not choose to compete with competitors for price and spell library, but instead gained a large number of users by virtue of its free model. Spotify actually plays a game of market share. It first attracts users to use the product and expands its user base until it becomes the industry leader, and finally considers profit.
When you have a large user base, will you still be afraid that there is no way to monetize it?
But for many companies, they are always too anxious to let users take out their wallets at first sight.
Spotify provides users with an experience beyond expectations, so that they can't refuse to become a paying user after trying the free service. However, users do not pay for a certain song, but an unlimited supply of 9.99 dollars per month. For many users, this is a very cost-effective business.
Spotify's innovative use of the "ad + payment" model in the music industry allows advertisers to become music payers, and the powerful coverage of the Internet allows the value of $9.99 to be infinitely magnified, and finally achieves a scale effect, which is comparable to a single song The first song sells a lot of money.
The fact is also true. It only took Spotify one year to increase the number of paying users from 0 to 1 million.
Tips: User value is higher than commercial value. When users' needs are met, companies will also get excess returns.
02
Music is not the core
Emotion is
This is a sentence that is often said, and it is often forgotten after it is said.
What the user needs is not a drill bit, but a hole in the wall.
Products are born on the basis of meeting the needs of users. In many cases, we only have products in our eyes, pursuing better materials, newer technologies, and more fancy functions, but forget the most basic needs of users.
So what are the needs behind the users listening to music?
In 2014, Spotify conducted in-depth research on 1.5 billion user-generated playlists and found that every moment when users listen to songs, there are obvious emotional changes and movement tracks, and music reflects people's emotions.
Spotify began to create different playlists for this interesting phenomenon. When you open the software in the morning of a working day, you can select "work", "perfect day", "prepare for a new day" and other playlists. When you are in a bad mood, you can select "sad" and " Sad" waits for the playlist.
But this is far from enough. Spotify is not only digging into users' emotions, but also wants us to be better.
When you are depressed and playing sad songs, the software will gradually push you relaxing and happy music to help you recover. When you choose a "work" playlist, you may feel pressure at first, but then you will become more focused. When you choose a "fitness" playlist, you will feel lazy and resisted at first, and then become more active...
Music is no longer a product, but listening and the emotional and behavioral data attached to it. Spotify provides a solution, positioning itself as: a platform to help people feel good.
On the premise of meeting user needs, does it have commercial space?
"For example, one morning you are playing a playlist of light music or soothing music, then we speculate that you may be doing yoga or meditating... Therefore, we will push advertising content that matches this moment, rhythm and mood based on this scenario. "
Spotify has launched an automated advertising service that allows advertisers to push accurate advertisements based on user sentiment or activity data such as "cold", "commuting", "learning", and "Girls' Day". Spotify also dutifully outlined how to use these moments to "turn corruption into magic"-successfully promote bad products.
Tips: Don't forget what the product ultimately solves the user's needs. Returning to the demand itself, you will find more profit opportunities.
03
As a music recommendation officer
Linker
"It is my favorite music app, especially its [New Discovery Weekly]. It makes me think it knows me so well, it knows my music preferences better than anyone, and recommends music every week. All made me very satisfied."
For Spotify users, every Monday they will receive a [New Discovery Weekly] playlist, which contains 30 songs in various styles, but you have never appreciated the songs. The magic is that each song is unique to you. It is a treasure.
Spotify is not like a traditional copyright owner, who has been selling music from its own artists. These 30 songs are not random pieces, but by looking for people who have the same hobbies as you, have listened to the same music, and have similar evaluations, and then infer your preference for music that you haven't heard.
After the release of the playlist, it does not end there. It will adjust and update the playlist in time based on the user’s storage, skip, and deletion of songs, and the abandonment of the entire playlist due to a certain song.
In today's information overload, it is a high-quality music recommender for users. Through complex calculations, these 30 songs coincidentally appear in front of you when you want them, creating a "know me" experience for users.
The more data you contribute to Spotify, the higher the transfer cost, and the more you cannot do without it.
Since the release of [New Discovery Weekly] in June 2015, Spotify has received more than 1.7 billion visits.
The traditional recommendation system is not friendly to new music and new singers. If it is not a popular singer, it will hardly recommend their music. The biggest challenge facing new singers is how to hear their music.
Spotify will find creators of various styles, give them tools, give them a platform, help them do what they want, and let more people hear their voices. Spotify analyzes the possibility that the music itself may be liked by different groups of people through insights into a large amount of data, and recommends it to the corresponding users in the form of [new discovery every week]. This is why you will be recommended to an artist who has never heard of it. The reason for the works.
In addition, Spotify will also help each type of creator build their own fan base according to their popularity.
In this new world, music has no boundaries, and a network of creators, producers, copyright owners and fans is formed.
Tips: A good product should be that all participants can meet their needs and benefit from it. This is sustainable development.
Conclusion
Music, an industry that is very close and far away from us. From lullabies to nursery rhymes, inter-class broadcasts, travel passion songs, work stimulants, late night spiritual sustenance, wedding accompaniment, and finally to the funeral, it almost accompanies our life.
This demand is long and constantly changing and has never been met. Spotify returns to the product itself and satisfies people’s emotional sustenance. All innovations are based on user needs, not formed products or commercial needs.
When the needs of users are met and the products they need are provided, creators will also be respected and paid attention to, and enterprises will also receive excess returns.
Such a super product, it allows users to comfort their emotions, hear the music they want to listen to, and silently encourage users to be positive, just like an old friend who listens to your worries and does not forget to make you strong.
If your business encounters any problems in the business process, please pay attention to the "Elos" public H, let us solve them together and make the next super product together.