50 people bought 16.71 million digital albums, and fans topped up half the sky in sales

Image source @Visual China Wen | Music First Sound (ID: nakedmusic), Author | Some Wenjie, Editor | Fan Zhihui Digital music payment (album and single) has undoubtedly become the most important online music payment model in China. Earlier, Xiao Zhan brought digital music into the era of over 100 million singles with the single “Light Spot”. In the past less than half a month, Cai Xukun’s new album “Mi” and THE9-Liu Yuxin’s EP ” “EPSILON” achieved sales of 71.77 million yuan and 42.31 million yuan respectively. Since QQ Music launched its first paid digital album “Oh, that’s great” at the end of 2014, domestic music platforms have used digital music to pay for the value of the fan economy and gradually cultivated the payment habits of ordinary users. But at the same time, the phenomenon of fans repeatedly buying digital albums has also attracted criticism from the media, pointing out that music apps are suspected of inducing users to repeat consumption. For a while, digital albums and singles paid seem to have become the target of public criticism, but we should also admit that the merits of this payment model should not be erased. 50 people bought 16.71 million digital albums, and fans topped up half the sky in sales In essence, the purchase of digital albums is actually paying for the on-demand and download rights of digital music works. For ordinary listeners, they only need to buy it once to meet their needs for listening to music. Of course, after a user purchases a digital album, he can continue to purchase the same album, and albums purchased repeatedly can be given to others, but it will not change the buyer’s own music listening experience. With the rise of the fan economy, it is not uncommon for a single user to repeatedly purchase the same digital album in large numbers. It can be seen from the sales page of the number one single “Light Dot” that is currently the number one sales on the entire network that users who support the top of the list have purchased a total of 326,760 copies. In other words, this user spent nearly RMB 1 million for a single with a unit price of RMB 3. If you want to squeeze into the top 100 of “Light Spot”, you need to buy at least 18,634. According to the statistics of Music Fortune, the current five digital albums with the highest sales in China have cumulatively supported the top ten purchases ranging from hundreds of thousands to more than one million. As shown in the figure below, these five albums (singles) support the top ten on the chart, and their purchases account for more than 2% of the album’s total sales. The total amount of repeated purchases of a single digital album (single) by these 50 users totaled 16.71 million yuan, accounting for nearly 4% of the total sales of the five albums, with an average consumption of 334,000 yuan per user. Data as of April 20 If the 16.71 million yuan is the sales of a digital album, then this album can be ranked 34th in the domestic digital sales charts, and the sales contributed by these 50 iron fans will exceed Wu Yifan’s single “6 “Sales of 16.633 million. Repeated purchases of digital albums are due to irrational consumption and misguided platform? “Fan irrational consumption” has long been a cliché in newspapers. Although the behavior of spending hundreds of thousands of repeated purchases of the same digital album is incomprehensible to many people, it is unavoidable to oversimplify it as “irrational”. According to the traditional consumption concept, consumers pay for the functional value of songs, and only need to purchase a digital album to meet the functional needs of listening to songs and downloading. From this perspective, repeat purchase behaviors cost more but cannot provide additional functions, so it is irrational. However, the fan community pays more attention to the emotional connection and symbolic value symbolized by buying digital albums and paying to support their favorite musicians. Before making repeated purchase decisions, fans have relatively certain emotions and feeling expectations for this consumption behavior. Moreover, compared to other methods such as buying endorsement products and participating in offline performances, buying digital albums may be a more convenient and direct means of fulfilling needs. In addition, surplus digital albums can be donated and exchanged. There are big fans and support clubs on Weibo, which use lottery and digital album gifting as a means of attracting attention and interacting with other fans. Fans with limited financial resources can also choose to use one or two digital albums purchased repeatedly to exchange other items with others. From this point of view, although the consumption behavior of fans follows a different set of logic, they are also rational in a certain sense. And how much influence the guidance of the platform has on the repeat purchase behavior of fans is not an easy question to answer. Take THE9-Liu Yuxin’s digital EP “EPSILON” as an example. On April 20th, this EP was launched on QQ Music. Taking into account the previous media’s doubts about repeated consumption, the platform has also adjusted its sales methods. For example, the fan activity page of “EPSILON” does not have cumulative purchase rankings and sales links. Fan benefits. After purchasing an album, click to continue to support, QQ concert prompts “You have already purchased the album, please spend rationally. Are you sure to support it again?” However, the enthusiasm of fans and the phenomenon of repeated purchases did not seem to be weakened. Music Xiansheng bought a piece of “EPSILON” in the morning, and the nameplate number obtained was 4842473, ranking 5W+ on the fan list. Data shows that at 12 noon that day, nearly 5 million copies of this paid EP were sold. At the same time, according to Music Xiansheng’s observation, 10W+ is the next data display threshold of the fan ranking, which means that when the sales of “EPSILON” reaches 4.84 million copies, the number of people who bought the EP should be between 50,000 and 100,000. . This means that as of this point in time, the per capita purchase volume of this digital EP is between 48 and 96, which is even higher than many previous hit albums. This also seems to show that the connection between repeat purchase behavior and platform guidance is not that big, and the motivation behind it is still rooted in the logic of the fan economy itself, as well as the musicians’ long-term operation and maintenance of fan relationships. Paying for digital music still has a long way to go in China Users’ low willingness to pay for digital music services has always been one of the most troublesome issues for domestic online music platforms. According to the 2020 financial report of Tencent Music Group (TME), the majority of TME’s revenue is still social entertainment and other services, accounting for 67.93% of the total revenue. In contrast, the online music service business sector’s revenue accounted for only It is 32.07%. Despite the rapid growth of online music user business, paying users and payment rates are increasing rapidly. In the fourth quarter of 2020, TME online music paid users reached 56 million, an increase of 40.4% year-on-year, and the historical payment rate exceeded 9%. This is a big gap compared to Spotify’s 45% pay rate. What’s more frustrating is that the low willingness to pay makes it difficult for music platforms to make money solely by providing online music services; after many intermediate links are distributed, musicians earn even less money from their music works. The “2020 Chinese Musicians Report” shows that 52% of musicians have no music income, and 24% of musicians have music income within 5% of their total income. The music income of most musicians cannot even cover the cost of music creation. Many people can only choose to engage in other occupations and “feed” music to maintain their creation with their main business. The launch of the digital album model can be seen as a solution to the dilemma between the platform and the musicians. In the UK, a questionnaire initiated by YouGov shows that if musicians can get higher copyright compensation, a large number of people are willing to pay higher streaming media subscription fees. 77% of the respondents believe that music creators do not get the income they deserve; more than half of the music fans surveyed said that if a larger proportion of the subscription fees they pay can reach the hands of musicians, they are willing to stream Media music spends more money. It can be seen that, for a considerable part of ordinary listeners, paying is not only to meet the functional needs of listening to music, but also a way for them to support music creators. Based on the digital album model, it can effectively shorten the path from user payment to musician income. In this sense, this model complements some of the shortcomings of the streaming media paid subscription model. Driven by the fan economy, some people who have never paid for music before have also begun to try to pay for music. Conversely, the gradual development of payment habits will also accelerate the music payment process of online music platforms. User comments under Zhang Yunlei’s digital album It is worth noting that as for the phenomenon of repeated purchases, it does not only happen to idol stars with a huge fan base. For example, A Yunga, a musical actor who went out of the circle through “Sound into the Heart”, sold 358,000 copies of the digital album “Immortal·THE ART” that was launched last year, and the top ten on the cumulative purchase list bought 63,294 copies. , Accounting for 17.7% of total sales. For another example, the digital album “The Invisible City”, which was launched by the post-rock band in July 2018, sold less than 10,000 copies in the first half of the month. Some fans also bought 100 copies, a single one. The number of music fans purchased accounted for more than 1% of the total sales. Before launching this digital album, Wangwen Band spent about a year to establish and improve the artist page data on NetEase Cloud Music, and consolidate the relationship with music fans by publishing more daily dynamics. When the album was released in 2018, Wangwen had accumulated more than 60,000 fans on the NetEase cloud music platform, and now this number has grown to 161,000. The core fans contribute a considerable proportion of the income source, which has always been an important feature of the fan economy. For musicians, in the Internet age, if you want to make money from music itself, it is not only necessary to create higher-quality works, but also to better operate and maintain the relationship with music fans. In other words, the digital album model has effectively stimulated the enthusiasm of some groups to pay, and also provides a more direct channel for music fans to support musicians. Whether this model can be universally applied to mid-tail musicians, and even promoted to more non-fan groups, and to develop a common payment habit for online music services by domestic users, still has a long way to go.