Sing it, why did you fall behind after ten years of debut?
■ Online K-song platform - sing it, it seems that there is a lot of "trouble" recently.
■ First, at the end of last year, Singba was included in the list of application software removed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology due to the problem of "collecting personal information beyond the scope".
Then at the beginning of this month, there were multiple media reports about layoffs.
■ Extending the time line, as the earliest player to enter the online K-song market in China, Singba has sprinted for IPO three times, but due to various reasons, it has never been successfully listed.
■ Sing, what happened?
Red Star Capital Bureau will review the ten-year commercialization road of Singba.
Ten years of singing
The debut scene is infinite, and the strong enemy is quickly killed
Speaking of singing, I have to mention Chen Hua, the founder of Singing.
Before founding Singba, Chen Hua founded Kuxun in 2006 to locate the search website, but after the introduction of capital, Chen Hua gradually lost his real power, then left Kuxun and joined Ali as the head of the big search department.
In February 2011, Chen Hua posted a Weibo: "Just finished the resignation formalities, officially left Alibaba, and started my second entrepreneurial journey."
Over 100 million users in 1 year
From November 2011 to January 2012, Chen Hua's entrepreneurial team has been meeting to discuss specific directions.
According to public information, they listed some criteria at that time: how big the market capacity is, how many competitors there are, whether they can think of innovative points in the product, whether they can make money, whether they can achieve self-propagation, etc., according to these criteria to filter the direction, After five or six times, I found that the direction of K song is still in it.
Therefore, Chen Hua officially decided to lead the team to do the K song business.
On May 31, 2012, Singba was officially released on the App store. Just three days after it went online, Singba rushed to the top ten free charts in the APP store, and on the fourth day it reached the number one position. The number of users exceeded 10 million in half a year. .
By October 2013, less than a year and a half after Singba was launched, the number of users had exceeded 100 million.
The popularity of Sing Bar far exceeded Chen Hua's expectations.
From an objective point of view, the popularity of the singing bar is because it really gathered "the right place and the right people" at that time.
On "Good Luck", Sing Bar was launched just in time for the hit of "The Voice of China", and Sing Bar successfully hitched a ride.
Secondly, the emergence of Singba was also at the time when the mobile Internet began to explode, and Singba also caught up with a good time.
In terms of product design, the popularity of singing bars is also inseparable from its social attributes.
When users use Singba, they can not only share songs by themselves, but also comment and send flowers to others to form interactions.
At the same time, in order to facilitate user registration, Sing Bar has opened account logins on multiple social platforms, including the hottest Renren, Weibo, and WeChat on the market. Users can share songs on social platforms with one click after recording songs from Sing Bar.
Here we need to focus on the cooperation between Sing Bar and WeChat. In July 2012, the two parties launched "WeChat Together, Let's Sing Together!"
》Large mobile karaoke competition.
The way to participate is easy and simple. Apple and Android mobile phone users download the latest version of "Sing It" and share their favorite music works through "WeChat" as a competition.
At that time, the cooperation between Singba and WeChat was a win-win situation. While Singba enriched the playability of WeChat at that time, WeChat also introduced huge traffic to Singba, which also laid the groundwork for the next story.
The good times are not long, and the giants are crushed
After Singba was launched, it became very popular, and similar karaoke tools followed one after another. For example, Renren, YY, Sina and other companies all made efforts to make online karaoke.
But they were not enough to shake the first-mover advantage of Singba, until a software called Quanmin K Song was launched, and Tencent stood behind this new player.
On August 26, 2014, the national K song officially opened for reservation and download, and it was first released on September 1, 2014.
In fact, for Tencent, it can be said that doing K-song business is a matter of course.
First of all, in terms of social communication, Tencent owns the social chain of two social platforms, QQ and WeChat, and has mastered the entrance of traffic.
Second, Tencent also owns a large library of music copyrights from QQ Music.
This is a huge innate advantage.
With the help of Tencent's social relationship chain one-click diversion, as well as social fission and dissemination such as the circle of friends, the national K song quickly exceeded 100 million users, and it is also regarded as the biggest opponent of Singba.
In December 2016, Quanmin karaoke announced that the total number of registered users exceeded 300 million and topped the mobile karaoke APP chart. The online karaoke industry has ushered in a new leader since then.
According to iiMedia Research consulting data, as of November 2020, in the field of online karaoke, the national karaoke ranked first with 165.91 million monthly independent devices, and Singba ranked second with 41.68 million monthly independent devices.
The distance between the two has widened considerably.
In an interview, Chen Hua once mentioned the national K song, and answered: "If you just talk about the product, I think the product and user reputation of Singba may not be worse than it, but it is true... The comprehensive advantages are too powerful, It's something we can't compare."
Try online and offline
Since 2014, Sing Bar has embarked on the road of "breakthrough".
First, at the end of 2014, Sing Bar moved to offline and invested in Mai Song KTV.
Through Singba's Internet genes and Maisong's offline entity management experience, Singba Maisong KTV plans to open 2,000 KTVs within 5 years.
However, with the diversification of user social entertainment scenarios, such as taverns and script killings that have exploded in recent years, the living space of traditional KTV is getting narrower and narrower.
According to the Tianyancha APP, in 2021, Singba Maisong KTV will have more than 500 stores, far below the original goal.
In 2015, Singba moved to the game business again and launched a mobile game called "Artillery Corps".
However, singing it lacking game genes has still not caused much market waves in the game.
In the same year, Sing Bar launched another microphone.
In 2016, the contribution rate of the business duet bar was more than 5%.
According to Chen Hua in 2021, "Singba's revenue mainly comes from the rewards of Singba software and the profits of hardware products such as Little Arena. The proportion of the two revenue lines is basically the same."
From the data point of view, selling microphones can be regarded as a more successful attempt to sing bars.
In addition, during the live broadcast in 2016, Singba also launched an independent live broadcast app-Mars Live.
However, because Singba chose an independent live broadcast app, Mars Live and Singba users did not form a good interaction and drainage, and did not cause great repercussions.
From offline KTV to game business to hardware business and live broadcast business, Singba never seems to stop in expanding new business.
Chen Hua once said in an interview: "Today, I am actually very lonely standing in the position of CEO. Although I don't know how to get rid of anxiety, I will continue to find the best answer in the loneliness and pressure, and I don't dare to slack off easily. .Since we want to do our best, we can only do our best."
At present, under the strong enemy, it is difficult to break through the stock market of online karaoke bars, the hardware equipment threshold is low, and the gross profit margin is also low, and it is difficult to support the future of singing bars.
Sing it's opponent
National K song is ready
Is the business of online karaoke?
Chen Hua finally chose the online karaoke track after several months of discussions with the team in the early stage of the second venture.
But looking back, is online K-song really a good business?
On February 12, 2018, Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME.US) was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's two major businesses include music streaming and social entertainment, covering Kugou Music, QQ Music, Kuwo Music, Quanmin The four major products of K song have a total of more than 800 million monthly active users.
But after its listing, Tencent Music has been called "a show company in the cloak of streaming media" by many insiders.
The reason is mainly because the revenue banner of Tencent Music has always been "supported" by the platform of the national K song.
According to the financial report, in 2018, Tencent Music’s other entertainment service revenue accounted for 70.84% of its total revenue. This revenue mainly refers to the virtual currency service revenue of the national karaoke.
Although the national K-song business has given Tencent Music a bad "reputation", it has also affected Tencent Music's valuation.
But in any case, this proves that the online K-song business can indeed make money, and it also makes Tencent Music's financial report look good in terms of data.
However, judging from the recent development of Tencent's music entertainment sector, the Red Star Capital Bureau found that the current situation of the national K song is also not optimistic.
According to the financial report, in the third quarter of 2021, Tencent Music’s revenue from social entertainment services and others was 4.92 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 6.4%.
In addition, the number of mobile monthly active users (MAU) of Tencent Music social entertainment service in the quarter was 205 million, a year-on-year decrease of 12.8%; the number of paying users was 10 million, a year-on-year decrease of 4.8%; the monthly ARPU (average revenue per user) was 163.9 yuan, a year-on-year decrease. Down 1.7%.
If the data is pulled back, in fact, the users of Tencent Music social service have already hit the ceiling, and monthly active users have experienced negative growth for six consecutive quarters.
Similarly, the number of people paying for social entertainment services is also declining, and there has been a negative growth in the number of people paying for 5 consecutive quarters.
In addition, ARPU and ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) both declined.
Why is there such a situation?
There are many reasons.
First of all, as far as the live broadcast industry is concerned, this track is already very crowded, and Douyu and Huya occupied the leading positions in the live broadcast industry.
After the rise of short videos, Douyin and Kuaishou (01024.HK), relying on the huge traffic gathered by short videos, have become the main positions of the live broadcast track.
As an APP based on "Show K-song", the competitiveness of products is greatly affected by the diversified entertainment needs of users.
In addition, the K-song live broadcast platform is closer to the show, so it is very prone to "edge ball" incidents, which also damages the reputation of users of such platforms.
On October 28, 2020, the Guangdong Provincial Office of “Crackdown on Pornography and Illegals” and the Provincial Internet Information Office interviewed Tencent and ordered a comprehensive rectification.
As of the close on March 10, 2022, Tencent Music closed at $3.95 per share, compared with the high of $32.25 per share in March last year, and the current total market value is $6.686 billion.
Chengdu Business Daily-Red Star News reporter Yu Yao and Liu Mi
summary
In the past ten years, I have experienced the peak of my debut, and I have also experienced the helplessness of being suppressed by powerful enemies.
Along the way, Sing Bar spends more time trying to find new paths.
But nowadays, even Tencent, the "rival" of Singba, is also feeling the pressure in the music social sector.
For singing, how many opportunities for trial and error are left?