Business Closed Loop: Starting with Ringback Tones to Take Down Giants

Yanjing Penguin Music Division.

Yan Kuan sat in the main seat of the conference room, while the projector showed the progress of negotiations between various record companies.

Including a most special being, the Immortal Name.

Tencent's goal in making music is clear: to try to generate a massive amount of virtual coins for its users in the music field.

After all, Tencent was one of the top service providers in the era of ringback tones, and they had witnessed the boom of the music market.

"Mr. Yan, the record companies all have the same attitude: both contemptuous and curious."

"On the one hand, they look down on the current scale of the Internet, and on the other hand, they are curious about the potential of new channels."

"Therefore, my suggestion is to postpone the cooperation with the record company."

"Because each of their top artists' works needs to be negotiated individually, and they even pool their resources to drive up the price."

Market manager Lao Yi reported.

He paused for a moment, then said, "The Xianming platform inadvertently touched upon the core pain point of the current music industry."

"Trust with creators and compliant copyright services."

Yan Kuan turned his gaze to the Immortal Name Platform, which occupied the largest portion of the projection.

Unintentional?

Yan Kuan sneered: "Whether it was intentional or unintentional, what's the internet's reaction now?"

Lao Yi retrieved a screenshot of the forum.

"The majority of people support it, especially after we announced the cooperation, there has been a constant stream of positive news."

"But there are also those who try to take advantage of the situation and imitate the 'immortal's name' model, as for record companies..."

"Every time a paid troll makes a comment, they get yelled at by their supporters and their posts are deleted and their accounts are banned."

Yan Kuan nodded, not surprised; this was the only light for them, the self-made creators.

It also gave a huge boost to the morale of many creators who were exploited by record companies.

"So, how are they doing?"

"In the most optimistic scenario, the human resource model will inevitably collapse within a week."

"But the news we released started to spread yesterday, and the number of submissions quadrupled."

The operations manager smiled.

"At this rate, they'll contact us in less than four days."

"At that time, priority song selection rights and sub-licensing terms will be easy to negotiate; we will be the upstream party."

Yan Kuan raised his head and glanced at him.

"Do you think they'll come to us when they can't hold on any longer?"

The operations manager paused for a moment, then said, "What else can they do?"

Yan Kuan didn't answer, but turned to look at the other person: "How's it going on the NESTS platform?"

The man opened his laptop: "The domain name registration has been approved, and the server will be in place this week."

"The team was poached from Huayi, they are experienced, and they can handle the 72-hour review process."

"Then let's push it," Yan Kuan said. "Use our channels, push it for a week."

The operations manager hesitated for a moment: "Mr. Yan, what if NESTS were our own?"

"Then why did we even bother contacting Xianming in the first place? We could have hatched it ourselves."

Yan Kuan raised his hand to interrupt him: "Have you ever seen a horse race?"

The operations manager shook his head; at this point, it was better not to understand than to pretend not to.

Yan Kuan stood up, his back to them.

"On the racetrack, you don't just let one horse run. You have to let two or three run together to see which one is faster."

He turned around.

"Immortal Name is the one we've got our eye on."

"But their asking price is too high, and they're unwilling to sign an exclusive deal, so let NESTS go up there and play along for a while."

"NESTS won, which means that Immortal Name is nothing special. It would be cheaper to use our own people."

"Xianming won, which proves they are indeed capable. So let's negotiate according to their rules, and we can relax the terms a bit."

He paused, then smiled:

"No matter who wins, the winner will ultimately be ours."

The young man suddenly realized, "I understand."

Yan Kuan walked back to his seat and turned off the projector.

"Keep a close eye on them."

"Report the situation to Xianming daily, and provide sufficient resources to YinCuo to keep them running smoothly."

Same city, different atmosphere.

There are so many demos that it's numbingly obvious.

Jiang Yilei opened his email and saw a new message.

The sender was an old acquaintance, an ordinary young man who was the first to send a song to Xianming.

The email read:

"Sister Jiang, I've written a second song."

"I've handled the copyright myself this time. The certificate is attached; you can just review it directly."

Jiang Yilei paused for a moment, then smiled. This was a good thing; it meant they had taught people.

She scrolled down, the next email, no one knew her, the next one, no one knew her, the next one…

Old Chen walked over and glanced at the screen: "How much is it?"

"I didn't count, I can't keep up." Jiang Yilei shrugged.

Old Chen was silent for two seconds, then sat down next to her.

Jiang Yilei sighed.

"People who came before genuinely wanted to release a song, but now they come because they think Xianming is going to be popular and they want to jump on the bandwagon."

Old Chen nodded: "That's normal. When you become famous, all sorts of people come."

"But we can't handle all the interrogations." Jiang Yilei turned to look at him.

"Brother Chen, do you think we've been... screwed over by our own fame?"

Old Chen didn't answer; he was also thinking about this question.

"Deputy Director Jiang, look at this."

Ma Xiaojun waved, and the screen displayed the familiar music forum.

"Give the members of Xianming some time, and let's give ourselves some patience as well."

The poster is an independent musician who has successfully released a song through the Xianming platform.

"RT, I'm happy to see so many new friends coming in, but I'm also quite worried, so I'm giving you a heads-up in advance."

"Xianming is not a big company, just a dozen or so young people who genuinely love music, some of whom are even just students."

"They listened to each of them and went through the copyright process one by one, not because they were slow, but because they were serious."

"With so many submissions coming in all of a sudden, they must be swamped. Don't rush them, good things come to those who wait."

"Recently, I've seen several platforms offering three-day reviews. Be careful and don't be fooled."

Dozens of replies have already appeared below the post.

1L: "Bump this post. I waited for almost a month and submitted all sorts of supplementary documents. Of course, I know they didn't do it on purpose."

"Later, when I saw that my song had been played 1 times on Baidu MP3, it was all worth it."

Replying to 1L: "Hey, how much does 1 views cost? I'm a complete newbie."

"If they're having such a tough time right now... should I still vote for them?"

1L: "Xianming managed to get 200 out of 10,000 views on Baidu, which is already pretty good."

2L: "Indeed, I just saw several platforms saying that the review process is fast, but they didn't say where it will be posted."

3L: "Found it, the original link is here. Everyone keep your eyes peeled, the situation is still unclear."

Looking at these replies and the voices of support, Jiang Yilei felt a sense of responsibility.

They cannot betray this trust.

Jiang Yilei snapped out of his daze and clicked on the link.

This is a tweet that was launched on the YNN Music platform.

"The founding team comes from a well-known record company, and the review period is guaranteed to be no more than 72 hours."

Old Chen was silent for a few seconds, then comforted him, "The market is big, so competition is normal."

"If we do our own thing well, there will always be someone willing to wait."

"But what do we do?" Zhou Tao and Li Ran asked with long faces.

"We only have so many people, and we only have so much time!"

Chang Sisi nodded and pointed to a stack of discarded CDs in the corner.

"This bunch of people are just trying to ride the wave, wasting time and making it easy to miss out on people who genuinely want to make music."

Old Chen frowned; he roughly knew about this kind of game.

He could only stabilize the channels and help protect rights, but he couldn't offer a solution to the current predicament.

Everyone instinctively looked towards the stairwell, towards Wang Song's office, which remained locked.

Without a leader to guide them, they were misled by the facade of conscience and responsibility erected on the internet...

It's under control.

We're backing down; we're sorry to the creators who believed in them.

They're caught in a vicious cycle of being subjected to simplistic, low-quality samples that rely on hype and are ultimately subject to human scrutiny.

That leaves only exhaustion and endurance.

Shenzhen.

Wang Song stared at the computer screen, on which was a simple and clear webpage.

"Alright." Wu Yue took off her glasses. "The rest is just renting bandwidth and routine maintenance."

Wang Song nodded, then suddenly asked, "Would you like to come back to Yanjing with me to start a business?"

"Why bother joining Tencent? What kind of employee are you? A Shenzhen hukou is worth less than a hair in Beijing."

"I'll get you a Beijing residency permit. Don't underestimate its current influence; it'll definitely be a huge benefit in the future."

His name is Wu Yue.

After being optimized by Tencent in his previous life, Wang Song unexpectedly encountered him and found that they were in the same boat.

He fared even worse; before the internet industry experienced a collective boom in 15, he was laid off as a T4 engineer.

Wu Yue smiled. "You're just a student, and you think you can get the household registration sorted out like that?"

"You talk like you didn't just graduate," Wang Song retorted.

Wu Yue thought for a moment, then asked, "So, what exactly do you want to do with your startup?"

Wang Song pointed to the webpage on the screen and showed him another entertainment news story.

"Hey, do you know Alibaba? They operate on a B2B model."

Wu Yue nodded; anyone with a bit of expertise would know this.

"And now, I'm asking you to build a webpage."

"It's a B2B2C model, which means leveraging the influence of large enterprises to do your own thing."

"By taking advantage of this most chaotic period in the music industry, we can turn it into a new traffic pool for the pan-entertainment ecosystem."

Wu Yue looked at the news report about Xianming.

"But you still haven't told me what you're going to do?"

Wang Song stood firm: "I want everyone in the future to use any of my services, forming a closed loop."

Wu Yue smiled and said, "Thinking too big a plan, aren't you afraid of falling?"

Then he turned around, picked up his bag, and went out the door.

"I'll help you set up the server. We can talk about the household registration issue after you've actually got it done."