Music in China Free as a bard

Music in China
Free as a bard
Seeking profit in the world's toughest
recorded-music market
Dec 2nd 2010 | BEIJING | from PRINT EDITION

音乐在中国
流浪乐人般的自由
在这个世界上最难获利的音乐市场
2010年12月2日 北京

.No one will pay to listen to us. Perhaps they'll pay to watch? SUPPOSE for a moment that the gloomiest predictions for the music business turn out to be correct. Efforts by governments and record companies to shut down file-sharing websites like the Pirate Bay fail. Piracy becomes so entrenched that people simply stop buying legitimate CDs. Customers drift away from Apple's iTunes store, which sells digital music tracks. They refuse to pay even trivial monthly subscriptions for music-download services like Pandora and streaming outfits like Spotify. Improbable? Not at all. In China, this worst-case scenario has already come to pass.

没有人会花钱听我们的音乐，也许人们会愿意掏钱看？谁知道。思索片刻，你会明白，对中国的音乐市场前景作出最悲观的预测是无可厚非的。政府和唱片公司竭力试图关掉想"海盗湾"这样的资源免费分享网站，但他们的努力以失败告终。盗版音像制品坚不可摧，于是就无人理会正版CD了。卖数字音乐唱片的苹果iTunes店里，顾客渐渐流失殆尽。人们甚至不愿为音乐下载服务（像"潘多拉"）或者在线流媒体服务网站（像spotify）花费微薄的月费。你认为这是在瞎扯吗？绝对不是。在中国，更坏的情况早就发生过。

.Chinese consumers "won't pay a penny" for recorded music, says Gary Chen. The music promoter turned digital entrepreneur ought to know. In 2006 he launched Top100.cn, a website which offered a choice of à la carte music downloads and monthly subscriptions. Its prices were low―but not low enough. Chinese music fans were raised on knockoff CDs and are now accustomed to getting hold of music for nothing on file-sharing websites. China will soon have the world's second-biggest economy, but its legitimate music market is tiny (see chart). So Mr Chen changed tack.

陈家利（译名）说，中国的消费者不会花上一分钱在音乐唱片上。那些后来改行做数码的音乐业内人士应该明白这一点。2006年，陈家利创立了top100.cn，这是一个提供菜单式音乐下载和按月订购服务的音乐网站。网站上的资源价格很便宜，但是对中国消费者来说还是不够低。中国的音乐迷是听盗版光盘培养起来的，他们已经习惯于分文不花地在   网站上下载音乐。中国将很快成为世界第二大经济体，但是他的合法音乐市场却小得可怜（见表）。因此，陈先生改变了经营策略.

Last year Top100 began to offer Chinese internet users free MP3 music downloads, supported by advertisements. The website resembles a free iTunes store, or a Spotify that lets you download files rather than streaming them. It is the only such service in the world to enjoy support from leading record companies. Top100 streams about 200m tracks a month. Some 60% of its traffic comes from Google, which has invested in the website. This year Mr Chen reckons he will sell about 10m yuan ($1.5m) in advertising. That would be a trivial sum in America or Britain. In a country where sales of recorded music amounted to just $75m last year, it is not at all bad.

去年，TOP100开始向中国网民提供免费MP3音乐下载，由广告赞助。这样，top100就类似于一个免费的iTunes专卖店，或者一个让你下载音乐而不是在线收听的SPOTIFY。TOP100是世界上唯一一个已获得唱片业巨头赞助的提供免费音乐下载服务的网站。Top100每月提供的的播放量次数约为2亿。约60%的收入来自GOOGLE的广告投入。陈先生预计他的广告会卖到一千万元（约150万美元）。这个数字放在美国或者英国或许是微不足道的。但是在一个去年唱片销售额只有7500万美元的国家，这个数字就不算太坏了。

Yet it is not good enough. Top100.cn is profitable only on an operating basis―in other words, before accounting for the money it pays to record companies for their content. Google's partial withdrawal from China earlier this year, which followed a cyber-attack on the company, reduced its share of the country's search market and cut traffic to Mr Chen's website. And Top100 faces fierce competition. Baidu, China's biggest search engine, also runs a popular MP3 search service. The record companies have sued, claiming that Baidu's service provides links to pirated songs. But so far the Chinese courts have ruled in the firm's favour. Mr Chen cites Baidu as his biggest competitor.

但是这还不够。TOP100.CN的盈利仅仅停留在网站本身的操作层面上。换句话说，把它付给唱片公司的使用费算进去之后，就很难说盈利了。今年初，谷歌在受到制裁后，从中国撤回了部分业务，减少了在这个网络搜索市场的份额。并削减了在陈先生的网站上的投入。
Top100面临激烈的竞争。中国最大的搜索引擎"百度"，同样经营着很受欢迎的MP3音乐搜索业务。唱片公司已经对百度提出了诉讼，指控其提供盗版歌曲链接。但是至今中国法院的判决还是站在了百度一边，陈先生把百度当做他最大的竞争对手。

If it is almost impossible to sell music, and hard to make money even from running advertisements next to free music, what options are left? Mr Chen has identified two. The first is to charge not for music but for selections of music. Top100 has begun to roll out smartphone apps through China's many online stores, charging a few yuan for music reviews and recommendations by well-known musicians, together with links to download their suggestions. The hope is that fans will pay for convenient, well-presented bundles of curated music, just as people pay for newspapers and magazines even though, in many cases, they can read all the articles online free. Next year Mr Chen also hopes to roll out a subscription cloud service, which will enable consumers to access their favourite tunes from a variety of devices.

如果买音乐几乎赚不到钱，甚至提供免费音乐、卖广告都很难赚钱的话，那还剩什么选择呢？陈先生摸索出了两个选项。第一个是，不向音乐本身收费，而对音乐选择收费。Top100已经开始通过中国众多的网点销售其智能手机设备，然后提供著名音乐人的音乐评论、推荐及其下载链接，以此收取几块钱的费用。这种模式的希望在于，乐迷愿意掏钱购买这样精心整理的音乐盛宴，就像人们尽管可以免费在网上阅读新闻和文章，但是在很多时候人们还是愿意花钱买报纸杂志。陈先生希望明年推出一项"订购云"服务，它将使消费者能够从多种播放器中选择他们最喜欢的播放器。

These experiments may not succeed. But Western media companies would do well to watch them. Forward-looking music executives and consultants have come to believe that, particularly for the young, value now resides not so much in recorded music but in the devices that play it, in the services that make it accessible and in the information and networks that allow it to be judged and shared between friends. In a country where other options for getting people to pay for recorded music have been exhausted, Mr Chen is putting those theories to the test. To see the future of the music business, look east.

这些实验未必能够成功。但是如果西方的媒体公司参考借鉴他们，或许会做得更好。有远见的前沿音乐制作人及业内专家相信，尤其对年轻人来说，音乐价值的体现不在那么局限在唱片了，而在于音乐的播放设备，在于使获取歌曲更加便捷的服务，在于它提供的能够让人评论和朋友间分享信息的平台和网络。付费听唱片的模式走到了穷途末路，而陈先生把自己的理论付诸实验。一窥音乐产业前途，还得看向东方。