The stage is bright and beautiful, and the stage is probably infinite anxiety about the uncertain future.
Driven by video websites, Chinese idol groups are moving in a new direction, from "Idol Trainees" to "Creation 101", which many people have also called 2018 the first year of idol groups.
According to the producer of "Creation 101", in the preparatory stage of the program, Tencent visited more than 400 female groups. Compared with South Korea's sound "hit the list" system, most of the Chinese girl groups are independent and lack a display platform for women's groups that can gather more popular fans. The consensus of the industry is that girls in the Chinese market have always been weak, actresses and actresses are extremely lacking, the market is lacking, and no one has cultivated.
What kind of business is the girl group? What do these little sisters rely on to survive? How does the company make money from its fans? Compared with South Korea, where are the problems with Chinese girl groups?
Representative of the successful case of the Chinese women's group: snh48
SNH48 is a representative of the Chinese women's group. In 2012, the Chinese sister group as the Japanese girl group akb48 officially debuted in Shanghai. As of January 2018, snh48 has 116 active members, divided into five teams (including 2 teams) (including 2 teams) and snh48 team nii (19 players), snh48 team x (19 players) and snh48 team ft (18 players).
Commercially, the biggest highlight of snh48 is the offline fan communication mode such as theater, final selection, and handshake meeting.
snh48 Dream Theater has landed in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and other places, and the mode of the theater is leasing or developer cooperation. Small concerts and talk shows are held regularly every Friday, Saturday and Sunday to form a fan gathering effect, and each performance is broadcast live online. After the performance, you can vote for the members of the group with the voting tickets on the ticket. Before the vote, the girls would stand in a row at the door and clap with all the spectators. The number of performances and attendance at the public performances each month will affect the income of the members of the group for the current month.
As the name suggests, the concept of a handshake meeting is true. A handshake coupon is used for 10 seconds, with a maximum of 12 coupons per use, for a total of 2 minutes. There will be a staff member on the spot, during which they can shake hands and talk with members, but physical contact and gifts are not allowed. When the time comes, you must leave, and if you want to continue shaking hands, you have to re-queue from the end of the line.
The finals are the possibilities for fans to vote on the "monopoly" resources that idols can get next year. Each voting ticket in the finals needs to be purchased by fans with real money. In the 2017 general election, snh48 fans voted a total of 3.3 million, with revenue of more than 100 million. For example, buying an electronic album for 50 yuan can get a voting opportunity, and you can also spend 1680 yuan to buy a support album, which is accompanied by 48 voting tickets, an average of 35 yuan per ticket. Based on the cheapest one of 35 yuan, the voting income alone exceeded 100 million yuan that night, and the champion Ju Jingyi received 277,800 votes, which means that her fans spent at least 9.722 million yuan to vote for it.
The revenue of the final selection also includes: the naming fee of the two companies of Micro Whale VR and Fantasy Westward Journey, as well as ticket revenue, advertising and so on.
In addition to offline, snh48 also has cd, support sticks, clothing, sketches (member photo photos) and other peripheral products. The purchase channel is the online official store. In addition to the three offline theaters, other channels are all direct sales online. Taking the general election as an example, in addition to the ticketing agent, the others are official direct sales, without going through any third party. Including peripheral products and daily transactions, all come from online malls, completely autonomous closed loops.
The real survival status of the domestic women's group industry and the dilemma of the business model
However, snh48 is after all one of the few successful cases among the girl groups, and more Chinese girl groups are operating dismally, surviving on the dangerous edge of disbandment and losing all their money.
To give a few examples:
56 flowers.
It is composed of 56 girls of all nationalities, aged 16-23. The only performance that can be searched about this girl group is the large-scale theatrical performance of "CCTV Fifty-Six Flowers of the Chinese Dream" in Wendu Water City, Beijing in 2015.
Just one year after the performance, in May 2016, the Beijing Xicheng District Cultural Committee and the concert partner "China Opera and Dance Theater" issued a statement, accusing the 56-flower group of organizing the concert in the name of the "Propaganda and Education Office of the Core Values of Socialism of the Central Propaganda Department" and defrauding the trust of two units by providing false materials.
atf。
He debuted in Shanghai in March 2016. Two EPs were made in a year. In 2017, it also won the "5th Annual Music Joy v Chart Annual Ceremony" Most Popular Group Award.
However, 2017 is not over, the women's group operator Heartbeat Entertainment can not determine the specific time of the next ATF meeting and handshake, issued an "announcement on the refund of online mall consumption".
Seven flowers.
Members are from the Deep Dance Team. Appeared in a public welfare performance at the 2011 Shenzhen University Games.
He made his debut in June 2012. In June 2014, due to the expiration of their contracts, the five members temporarily left the team. In April 2015, the second generation of seven flowers appeared, including Xu Qiman and Wei Huan in the first generation, due to insufficient exposure and influence, the second generation of seven flowers is far inferior to the first generation.
Seven Flowers mainly relies on traditional ways such as releasing new songs and holding concerts, but because marketing and publicity are not in place, Seven Flowers has been criticized for its obvious styling and marketing studio style.
The most tragic case of the Chinese girl group is "1931".
This girl group was created by yy and officially debuted in November 2014. At the time of its debut, yy Entertainment announced that it planned to invest 500 million yuan in this idol group composed of 18 simple girls, which means that each girl per capita will "get" nearly 28 million yuan of investment.
But just three years later, by the end of 2017, disbandment was announced in 1931. The one with the most likes and comments under the dissolution announcement is "Sorry, I only learned about this combination for the first time on the day of dissolution.".
The low threshold and the difficulty of profitability are common diseases in the entire women's group industry.
The source of these Chinese women's groups can be attributed to the lack of patience of the operating company and the attempt to be small and broad.
· First, the origin of team members is uneven.
In addition to the common selection of foreign girl groups and the way of scouting, some members of The Chinese women's group come from etiquette companies, some come from modeling companies, and there are a large number of underground women's groups based on associations. For example, the Shenlong Girl Group of Ying San Jia Ge, the owner of Li Yi Bar, was an unofficial organization of Baidu Tieba before its official debut.
· Second, training is not systematic.
After the trainees entered the company, there was no comprehensive training shaping. Many girl groups only have a few months from joining to debuting, compared with the training time of Korean trainees from basically two years, the domestic women's group is too fast.
Zhang Zhanhao, the founder of China Cherry, once said in an interview: China needs fast production and fast sales, and trainees do not have so much patience. If a troupe does independent performances, it may take a year to produce at least one or a half original songs, but if I do more groups, each group has two or three songs, and I use the way of joint performances to practice and grow up earlier.
Public reports show that There are already 5 women's groups under the umbrella of China Cherry, such as ssidol, anyway, cherrygirls and so on. The training time of the women's group under the middle cherry system, from the selection of ordinary people to the simple announcement, only takes 3 to 6 months.
· Third, there is no operational idea, and the company has no resources.
The girl group is really not an industry that can succeed as long as the little sister is good-looking and talented. Whether the company can receive advertisements, endorsements, and commercial cooperation for members, and whether it can organize matching offline activities for girls, are all indispensable links. However, due to the complexity of the background of the industry companies, many women's group operators are not professional brokerage companies, and the resource side cannot play a role at all, resulting in the women's group being "covered to death".
Wang Cong, former vice president and secretary of the board of directors of Huace Film and Television and CEO of Mai Rui Entertainment, proposed a system: six steps of selection, training, planning, production, publicity and brokerage are indispensable. He believes that the women's group has high requirements for the company's commercial resources and capabilities, and pays more attention to film and television and endorsement. "The main monetization path is fragile to fans, because fans will always climb the wall and choose better content and idols."
To sum up, the breakthrough path of the Chinese women's group lies in the company behind it:
· There must be a content production line. From planning to shooting, to editing, to post-production, to publicity, it is a one-stop.
· The member training mechanism must be sufficiently robust and mature. From the beginning, everyone went to select people, and then to the intermediate training, elimination, and screened out a batch. Then it must have a continuous growth system from the bottom up, and this growth system must have a relatively clear goal mechanism, and what level can be combined to debut. There should be a difference in the treatment between the combination and the non-combination.
· Lots of people. The number of trainees within the company cannot be small. After people are popular, it is easy to fly alone, so there must be a relatively complete system, and the combination of the head is basically a new combination in one to two years to give the market some fresh blood. The large number of people directly determines the possibility of trying many business models, and the premise of many people is that the company must have money to be able to support them.
What is South Korea doing?
In South Korea, the situation is completely different.
Idol groups such as boy bands and women's groups belong to one of the categories of artists, and the professional attributes are very obvious, and they are even called "artists who punch in the clock at work". And these groups are run by almost all brokerage firms. This is very different from China, which operates a variety of entities, including brokerage companies, internet celebrity companies, Internet companies, modeling companies and so on.
There are two main types of trainees in South Korea: draft activities and scouting.
Trainees usually have more than 2 years of professional training.
South Korea has formed an assembly line in terms of artist training. According to publicly available data, South Korean agencies need to invest at least 1.5 billion won (about 8.9 million yuan) to cultivate a group, and at least 2 billion won (about 11.9 million yuan) per album.
In terms of monetization model, due to the development of the Korean music industry, but the Chinese film and television films are extremely highly paid and the music is declining, the profit path of the girl groups of the two countries is very different.
Specifically, Korean girl groups make money through the following channels:
Concerts
Albums
Peripheral derivatives
Games
Fans
However, it is also cruel that the current South Korean boy band girl group market has become saturated. There are an average of 300 groups ready to debut in a year, of which about 50 can get debut opportunities, and only 1-2 groups can really be popular.
epilogue:
The girl group is not a simple business, and the rapid ripening function of capital does not seem to have much effect on this industry. The needs of women's group formation and traffic sustainability in turn require operators to have more patience and more abundant capital investment. The competition of the women's group is essentially a competition of the company's operational ability, capital strength and resource grafting ability.
Once the "Creation 101" program ends, the women's group will have to pk or follow-up continuous content production and operation capabilities, too many artists are popular by variety shows but quickly lonely, and the continuous operation status behind it is the essence of the girl group, after all, the era of "one person and one famous song, mixed eating and drinking red for a lifetime" has long passed.