Shut Down Shrimp? Ali'S Thirst Is Being Solved

Ali is turning.

On the evening of November 29, Xiang Zheng, former marketing director of Warner Music and universal music in China, announced on his micro blog that shrimp music would be closed in January next year. Subsequently, it caused heated discussion. Ali's attitude toward the closure rumor is ambiguous and "no comment" is his response to the 21st century economic reporter.

Although the big wave of shrimp fans said after hearing the news that they are reluctant to part with, but objectively, they have become more and more small, and even ignored. According to the October mobile Internet industry rankings released by trustdata data, in the current period, the monthly life of kugou music was 169.5 million, with a month on month increase of 3.21%; the monthly life of QQ music was 85.98 million, a decrease of 1.97%; the monthly life of KuWo music was 61.32 million, with a month on month increase of 2.97%; the monthly life of Netease cloud music was 53.79 million, with a month on month increase of 8.80%. The top three are all Tencent, but shrimp music is not on the list. Once upon a time, shrimp music stood at the top of the "contempt chain" of users.

The other side of high monthly loss is low loss. According to the financial report, as of September, Xiami music's innovation business group had a loss of 4.283 billion yuan, up from 2.865 billion yuan last year. Previously, the IPO of Ali Hong Kong stock showed that the innovative business also included Gaode map, nailing, tmall genie, etc. In addition, according to Ali CFO Wu Wei at the financial report meeting, the business group also includes the Dharma academy and its 16 laboratories.

It's not that Ali hasn't used his heart to music. In 2013, Ali wholly acquired Xiami music. In 2015, it established a music group. Gao Xiaosong and song Ke served as the chairman and CEO respectively. The relevant music businesses of Xiami and tiantiantiantuo were fully integrated. However, in a round of integration, shrimps are gradually far away from the market center, especially in the copyright war. According to the big data of Aurora, in 2019, the market penetration rate of shrimp music is only 1%, and the monthly life is only 5 million.

Wang Hao, the founder of Xiami, was one of the earliest programmers in Ali, and then chose to start a business. In the absence of a profit model in the music industry, he sold shrimp and returned to Ali. In 2016, Wang Hao left Xiaomi and joined Ali's social product nailing team. "The current state of the industry is outrageous." This is his farewell message.

In September 2019, Netease cloud music obtained a total of $700 million in financing from Alibaba, Yunfeng fund, etc., and the control right is still in the founder Ding Lei of Netease. Since then, the two sides have started frequent business cooperation.

Pride such as Ali, in the "centralization" failure, began to try to let go.

"Anxiety"

Is music important to Ali? The essence of the problem is the strategic significance of entertainment industry to Ali.

In 2012, there was a big discussion within Ali group on "what China needs most in the next 10 or 20 years". Ma Yun, the founder, asked himself, "what do Chinese people lack most in 10 years? Double H！ Health and happiness. "

Behind Ma Yun's statement is Ali's constant traffic anxiety. In fact, Alibaba has the highest realized value of e-commerce traffic, but this is not on the same level compared with Tencent, which has similar revenue scale.

Abundant flow, gave Tencent a calm space. There is still room for the realization of wechat advertising. Even pinduoduo, a new giant, has given Ali a heavy blow.

Byte jump rise, more heavy Ali anxiety. According to Tencent News, Twitter's advertising revenue target this year is more than 90 billion yuan. According to the analysis of people familiar with the situation, the agency said that the domestic revenue of tremor in 2020 may reach about 130-150 billion yuan.

According to the 11.11 sales war report released by shaking tone e-commerce, the total duration of live broadcasting is 27 million hours, and the cumulative number of watching and broadcasting uv12.6 billion. The highest number of users of online watching and broadcasting at the same time is 4.28 million. Finally, a single Gmv of more than 10 million live broadcasting rooms and 1383 live broadcasting rooms of more than 1 million are realized. The total transaction volume of the platform's overall payment caliber is 18.7 billion. Among them, the daily transaction volume on November 11 exceeded 2 billion 。

In the first ten days of June, byte skipping officially established a first-class business department named "e-commerce". In order to coordinate the e-commerce business operations of its twitter, today's headlines, watermelon video and other content platforms, it means that "e-commerce" has clearly become a strategic business with byte skipping. Since October, the live broadcasting room no longer supports third-party product links such as Taobao and Jingdong. At the same time, byte skipping has obtained the payment license of unizhong e-commerce, which connects users (600 million people a day), commodities (traditional manufacturing industry belt which starts from Taobao and pinduoduo, cooperates with local e-commerce associations), payment and other links, and forms a closed-loop of chattering e-commerce.

"It is far less difficult for the upstream flow to go down than for e-commerce to go up. We also have to become a source of traffic. " The person in charge of relevant business of Jingdong confessed to the reporter of 21st century economic report.

For Ali, byte skipping not only robbed important advertising marketing revenue, but also began to invade e-commerce. This is intolerable. After the defense fails, you can only attack.

In addition, as online traffic peaked, Alibaba's cost of acquiring customers soared. According to the financial report, the cost of acquiring customers has increased from 150.4 yuan / person in 2015 to 530.4 yuan / person in 2019. Whether from the future strategy or the current business, Ali must find new sources of traffic.

In this case, in view of the accompanying nature, the music flow with considerable growth space is the place Ali can not give up. It's just that the path has changed.

"Let go"

In 2019, Alibaba became a shareholder in Netease cloud music, which became the beginning of this change.

The $700 million round of financing was for the B2 round of Netease cloud music. At that time, Netease specially emphasized that after the financing, Netease still had the sole control over Netease cloud music.

In April 2017, Netease cloud music completed a round of financing of 750 million yuan. In November 2018, Netease cloud music completed more than $600 million in round B financing. In the last round of financing, investors include Baidu, pan Atlantic investment group, Boyu capital, etc., and Baidu is the strategic investor. In addition, according to the 21st century economic report, after the above financing, Ali's shareholding in Netease cloud music is higher than that of Baidu.

Behind the investment in Netease cloud music is the continued backwardness of shrimp music, and even the whole Alibaba entertainment industry is hard to see improvement. Take Youku, the most popular ace in Alida entertainment, for example, which has been thrown out of the first camp.

This is related to Ali's "centralized" control, strong channel culture, and not suitable for the cultural and entertainment industry. Taking shrimp as an example, the external reason for falling behind in the copyright war is that the external management does not really understand the industry and the focus is shifted. With Ali's volume, it can make a splash quickly, but it will also go further and further on the wrong road.

Ali chose basic holding in foreign investment, which ensured its control over the new subject, but also lost the founding team. In 2013, in the new round of organizational structure change of Ali, the investment department scattered in various business units was assigned to "Group Investment Department" together with independent Ali capital. Since 2014, it has completely abandoned the function of "financial investment" and turned to the "strategic investment" which is more inclined to the middle and later stage and more inclined to take up a larger proportion of shares, and insisted on holding investment. Including hungry Mo, Yintai, Youku, shrimp music and other cases.

The choice of "holding" is closely related to the pattern of Ali's industry. "Data is so important that we can share it with you only when we have full control. Channels are also important. " A middle-level Ali told the 21st century economic reporter that he vividly illustrated this logic by the depth of cooperation between the two sides before and after Ali's complete acquisition of Yintai department store.

However, this does not work in the entertainment industry. In the entertainment industry which emphasizes "human nature", the role of channels has been greatly reduced, and Ali has never been the largest channel. This has become one of the reasons for Ali's embarrassing position.

As a result, for the upstream flow that cannot be abandoned, Ali began to choose "let go" and accept the equity participation mode. One of the progress is that Netease cloud music has reached a strategic cooperation with Alibaba 88vip, and Netease cloud music black glue VIP annual card rights have been added to the 88vip annual ecological benefit package. This is a good complement to each other.

In addition, in the long video, Ali is also doing similar exploration. On November 16, mango super media announced the progress of the controlling shareholder's solicitation and transfer of some shares. As of the deadline for public solicitation, mango media, the controlling shareholder, received the application materials in effective form submitted by one intended transferee of Alibaba venture capital. The total scale of this agreement transfer will exceed 6.2 billion yuan. In addition, according to the third quarterly report, mango media currently holds 64.20% of the shares. Once the transaction is concluded, Ali will become the second largest shareholder of mango media, and the controlling right will still be in the hands of mango media.

Behind Ali's stake is mango super media e-commerce dream. "In the 5g era, the next video internet industry is e-commerce, and video and content are malanshan people's greatest advantage and moat. At present, the e-commerce platform is calling for the establishment of an elite team of more than 500 people within the radio and television group, giving full play to the content creation energy of the radio and television team, and building an e-commerce platform around the three elements of people, goods and content. " Recently, Zhang Huali, chairman of Hunan Radio and television group and chairman of mango super media, wrote an article. For Alibaba, a strong content platform will also make up for its traffic gap.

"Holding" or "equity participation" is only a form. From this point of view, Ali is still a flexible giant.