When there is a dispute over the acquisition of Asia God, the biggest hidden worry faced by Taihe Music is still copyright.
when it comes to the long-standing history of copyright disputes, at a time when competitors are scrambling for copyright again, Taihe Music needs to find a solution as soon as possible.
recently, Taihe Music Group has encountered something troublesome.
on June 20, Taihe Music Group announced the acquisition of Beijing Asia God Music and launched an in-depth strategic cooperation with Taiwan Asia God Music.
unexpectedly, on the 22nd, the official account of Jingwen Records posted a message that Taihe Music Group and Yashen Music were not shareholders of Jingwen Records, and Jingwen Records had nothing to do with them. The high-quality music rights accumulated by Jingwen Records over the past 20 years are owned exclusively by Jingwen Records. As of the date of release of the statement, Jingwen and Taihe Music and Yashen Music had not signed a music copyright transfer agreement or license agreement.
in response to Jingwen's statement, people from Taihe Music Group said that the other party was pure touch porcelain, and said that they had learned of the relevant intangible assets transfer agreement and litigation judgment during the acquisition due diligence.
obviously, Taihe Music encountered the last hole in the acquisition process. When it comes to the long-standing history of copyright disputes, at a time when competitors are fighting for copyright again, Taihe Music needs to find a solution as soon as possible. Xue Zhiqian's concert scalpers before that is another challenge that Taihe Music needs to face in terms of offline layout.
strong > unexpected disputes / strong >
in terms of Taihe, Yashen Music has its predecessor (Beijing Infinite Art Culture Communication Co., Ltd.) and Beijing Jingwen record Communication Co., Ltd. signed the "Intangible assets transfer Agreement" in August 2005. and there is the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate people's Court judgment on the copyright lawsuit between Yashen and a third-party company in September 2008. But unexpectedly, there was a Beijing record on the way.
it turns out that as early as October 2005, Jingwen Records announced that it would merge with Infinity Yineng, and invest 10 million yuan to establish Yineng Jingwen Media holding Group.
Why did Beijing Records, which was very popular at the end of the last century, agree to merge? In fact, by the year before the merger, China's recording industry had gone downhill, while Yineng benefited a lot from its Kuke Music Network in the booming CRBT market at that time. The cooperation between Jingwen and Yineng, which has a lot of copyright resources, can also be said to be a natural move.
at the beginning of its establishment, Xu Zhongmin, president of Jingwen Records, said that he hoped to give full play to the brand and music resource advantages of Jingwen in the traditional recording industry, integrate the technology of unlimited arts in the emerging media field, and become a new force in the music industry. However, due to the gradual decline of the CRBT business and the fact that Xu Zhongmin, the founder of Jingwen Records, focused on the cooperation with fellow villager Huang Guangyu, the integration between the two sides was not smooth.
in November 2006, the spread of unlimited art culture in Beijing was renamed to the spread of Beijing subdivine culture. In 2007, Beijing Yashen Culture sued Shanghai Yuesheng Information Technology Co., Ltd. in Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate people's Court, alleging that the company made a profit by using more than 270 songs copyrighted by Yashen on its website.
in the evidence submitted by Yashen to the court, there is one evidence that Jingwen Records and Infinite Yineng signed an "Intangible assets transfer Agreement" in August 2005, with an attachment listing the covered music works. According to the files, in 2006, Yashenyu signed a copyright transfer Agreement with Yashen Culture.
from the above information, we can see that Jingwen Records did sign an agreement on the transfer of intangible assets with the predecessor of Beijing Yashen. However, it is not clear whether Beijing Yashen transferred the copyright of music works to Yashen Music with the consent of Xu Zhongmin, who owns 70% of Jingwen Records.
some people in the intellectual property circles said that this can only depend on whether a new transfer agreement has been concluded between Jingwen and Yashen Culture in the light of the progress of the joint venture. It is possible that the original copyright business management in Beijing is in a state of confusion, and the unclear ownership of copyright use rights between the two sides has led to today's controversy.
this copyright dispute is not difficult to understand at a time when the value of copyright has risen sharply. A few years ago, the price of all rights for a record company might have been only tens of thousands of yuan, but now the price has soared to millions of yuan.
because the online music platform uses the abundant capital strength to buy copyright wantonly, its price is still in the rising channel. For example, some time ago, the copyright music library of Spinnin Records 7000, a well-known electric sound brand, is valued at 100 million US dollars. From here, we can also see why Jingwen may not care so much about copyright in the past, but now that record companies mainly make money from the old copyright, they are bound to increase their claims for their original copyright.
apart from copyright being the lifeblood of Jingwen, Xu Zhongmin, its controlling shareholder, may have other plans. After going through the twists and turns such as imprisonment, Xu Zhongmin made a comeback to invest in Gome, CITIC and other investments to acquire a company under Huaqiang, renamed as closer online entertainment.
the company has signed up 200 cutting-edge musicians to complete 300 original music works, and plans to establish a music copyright operation management and marketing system. As a veteran of the music industry, Xu Zhongmin would rather transfer the copyright to his new platform for online entertainment than give it to outsiders.
strong > behind the scalpers / strong >
Taihe Music, after merging Baidu Music in 2015, has made great efforts to distribute the online music market with its content advantage. At present, it has brands such as Taihe Wheat Field, Sea Butterfly Music, Dashi copyright, volume and so on. Recently, it has invested tens of millions of dollars in Owhat, a fan service platform, and invested heavily in campus music platforms without music. It can be seen that its determination to lay out the entire music industry chain.
Yang Haoyu, general manager of Taihe Music performance Management Department, believes that with the development of China's overall performance market, the future scale of Livehouse performances should reach several hundred million, and the scale of its Xiuzhi alone has more than tripled in the past two years.
but before this acquisition, Taihe Music also encountered a small setback in its offline concert activities. As we all know, offline concerts involve key links such as ticketing and venues. Due to the low degree of marketization, these resources are not easy to deploy and difficult to control.
earlier, Taihe Music and its artist Xue Zhiqian issued a statement on the tour, saying that the organizer Taihe Music would never choose to buy tickets, and that he chose to stay in Taihe because he had helped him in difficult times. For the June 24 Wuhan concert, Taihe Music Group issued a reminder not to buy scalpers tickets.
when it comes to how deep the scalpers are, you can get a glimpse of Wang Sicong's complaint about the high ticket prices of Faye Wong's concert. Wang Sicong believes that the highest ticket price of 7800 yuan is obviously beyond the general market and the affordability of fans. However, some people familiar with the situation believe that the concert scalpers may have been deliberately created. Organizers hold down ticket prices, creating tension among ticket buyers. This is actually a campaign marketing behavior, just imagine, if the stars hold concerts, it will be very embarrassing if the front doesn't stir up the fans' appetite and the back shows can't be sold.
in fact, low fares have other advantages for organizers, ticketing and partners. There are about 1/10 internal tickets in a concert. If you get these internal tickets from internal channels, you can make a lot of money if you sell them to scalpers. On the face of it, the star team takes most of the income, while others share it very little, but through this kind of benefit distribution of internal votes, all parties are basically satisfied.
if the singer raises the ticket price substantially, it is obvious that the interests of the organizers and ticketing will be harmed. This time, although Taihe Music and Xue Zhiqian wrote a long defense, the reason was somewhat pale. Xue Zhiqian himself admitted that he did not know and could not control how those tickets got into the hands of scalpers.
Taihe Music actually understands that reminding fans alone cannot change the status quo of scalpers market. At present, the hot head performance content has become the hardest hit area of the ticket market. Because it is difficult to get a ticket, there are some second-hand ticketing services in the market, such as West Ten District, Niu Devil King and so on, which are called high-grade scalpers. The low-price tickets for some popular performances are relatively high on these second-hand ticketing platforms, and only high-priced tickets can get a little discount.
from the point of view of the second-hand ticketing platform, scalpers and retail scalpers are like big and small investors in the stock market. Organized scalpers can gather hot tickets together to regulate the price, while retail scalpers can provide vacancies for low-priced tickets. Some people in the industry believe that only by using these high-level scalpers to make them transparent can we really avoid scalpers from driving up ticket prices.
strong > copyright struggle is becoming more intense / strong >
putting aside these specific entanglements, the biggest hidden worry facing Taihe Music is still copyright.
after the music copyright crackdown in 2015, major online music platforms set off a wave of competition for the best part of the copyright. There has been a temporary silence since then. However, with the expiration of the previous copyright, a new round of copyright struggle began again.
among the three major online music platforms, Tencent Music Group, Taihe Music and Ali Music, Tencent ranks first in terms of copyright ownership. Tencent Music Entertainment Group Group also announced the signing of a Chinese mainland regional digital rights distribution strategic cooperation agreement with Universal Music Group. It has been granted the exclusive rights of universal music in March, and this time it has acquired the recording rights of master tapes.
all three parties are involved in the copyright battle, with licensing fees ranging from $30m to $40m at the beginning to $350 million in cash plus $100m in equity at their heaviest. In March, NetEase Yun Music won the exclusive copyright of AVEX based on ACG Music. Baidu Music has the right to record Rolling Stones.
among the above, Tencent and Ali have the strongest natural capital strength, and Taihe Music, which merged with Baidu Music, is naturally unable to compete in this respect. NetEase Yun Music introduced Shanghai Wenguang and Mango Wenchuang in April and obtained 750 million yuan A round financing with a valuation of 8 billion yuan.
behind these contention, it is the numerous application scenarios of music copyright that cause its price to be raised gradually.
first of all, there are a large number of singer variety shows, these programs need a large number of songs singing as their main content and business model, some program organizers have a weak awareness of copyright, which leads to copyright disputes. When Xue Zhiqian sang "Anhe Bridge" in Shanghai, the owner of its copyright, Modern Sky, said that he had never contacted the copyright owner in terms of infringement and Taihe Music.
secondly, short music videos have recently become an investment outlet. Douyin, Xiaocaxiu and others have purchased some copyright music libraries, but there are still many video production teams that infringe on music copyright. On the one hand, video producers think that they are non-commercial and do not need authorization; on the other hand, the short video production cycle is short, and it is time-consuming and laborious to obtain authorization. But in any case, any use of music requires authorization.
in addition, some cross-border companies are also entering the music streaming market. It has been reported that Tesla, the world's largest electric car maker, has been in talks with all record companies to acquire music rights and launch an exclusive streaming music service bundled with Tesla. Amazon, Apple and others have long realized the great potential of the music business and laid it out early.
once upon a time, record companies seemed to lose interest in their beauties as they got older, but now they seem to have turned around. Many record companies make money by lying down with huge copyright fees. The copyright problem is also prominent in the music market segment.
in February this year, the Phonographic Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against hip-hop streaming platform Spinrilla and its founders on behalf of major record companies in the Federal Court of Georgia. They sued that music fans had unconditional access to more than 20,000 music recordings owned by the plaintiff through the service of the site. The reason for targeting the platform is that hip-hop has become a business with annual revenue of more than $5 billion. And Taihe Music is working with hip-hop fusion to expand this market segment.
facing the challenge of copyright performance market, Taihe Music realizes that it needs to give full play to its advantages in 2C and compete in dislocation with Tencent Music, which is good at 2B. Perhaps, only through the T-list and other music incubators continue to discover music newcomers can be truly invincible.
Edit: jessica