On December 12th, Tencent Music Entertainment Group’s Kugou Music and Ultimate Music jointly announced a strategic collaboration agreement with Changhong Rainbow Cube. At the same time, Changhong Rainbow Cube released the world’s first 5G+AIoT smart TV, Q8T PRO.

“This is a good opportunity to open up new channels for people to enjoy music at home. I hope we can turn this into an industry movement and make more partnerships to bring music from traditional streaming platforms into more music consumption scenarios.” Zhao Haizhou (赵海舟), Kugou Music’s VP said at the press conference.

Compared to the saturated B-to-C music market, the B-to-B music market is still largely unexplored. This collaboration between Kugou Music/Ultimate Music and Changhong Rainbow Cube illustrates that B-to-B music consumption such as the smart TV market has become a new hot spot for competition.

Home Entertainment: From “Listening to Music” to “Listen, Sing and Watch Music”

Digital native Gen Z users have a strong proclivity to smart, interactive home appliances. According to Kuyun(酷云) Research, on average as of September 2019, smart TVs are used on 51% of the days and for an average length of 348 minutes. Demand for smart TV is strong, and younger users have shown a return from mobile devices to bigger screens.

Under these market conditions, adding popular entertainment options that have strong adaptability to technology such as karaoke is a very reasonable next step.

How to improve the users’ experience while interacting with a smart TV has been a topic for constant debate. According to Changhong’s Music Product Manager, currently, most smart TVs have a function switch time of 30 seconds and don’t support switching from listening to singing to watching. But research shows that most users don’t have the patience for interactions that are more than 20 seconds.

In order to bridge the gap, Changhong smart TV utilizes Bajin Tech’s software and hardware to enable users to control the system with their voices. With this technology, Changhong smart TV can enable users to switch on the device right before they start to sing karaoke, and switch to another song within one second.

Karaoke interface on Changhong smart TV

Regarding the future of home music entertainment, Zhao Haizhou believes that 5G will make music entertainment more diverse, more interactive, and there will be better system integration between TV, mobile phone, computers, and other music entertainment channels.

Kugou: From Consumer to Business, Technology Drives Content Revolution

Technology and the development of the music industry have a strong correlation. Technology affects how music is created, distributed, and consumed.

So far, the copyright protection system in the consumer side of the music industry has already matured and normalized. Kugou music, holding the copyright of millions of songs, can keep exploring more ways to further engage the consumers, or it can develop more commercial use for the music copyrights.

Regulations and copyright infrastructures on the commercial side of the music market are still in their infancy. However, with the entrance of companies such as 100Audio, Lava Music, and VFine Music, competition in the commercial music market intensifies. Within the commercial use market, 5G+AloT remains largely unexplored. According to IDC’s estimate, by 2020, AI technology would bring in more than 47 billion US dollars in revenue to home appliance companies, becoming the next hot area for the industry’s development.

In China, many tech companies have also realized the potential of the 5G+AloT market. Starting from 2018, companies like Xiaomi, Huawei, and Alibaba have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in AloT technology and building business models around it. With new technology, the music industry will revolutionize as well.

In May 2020, Kugou Music and Ultimate Music collaborated with Dangbei(当贝), a smart TV application platform, and built a Dangbei Kugou Music App for smart TVs. As of September 2020, the App was downloaded more than 1 million times. In July, Kugou Music and Viomi Technology(云米) reached a strategic cooperation agreement to explore 5G IoT interconnection music consumption in Viomi’s smart home appliances.

The new collaboration with Changhong Rainbow Cube has a bigger scope than all the previous ones. It includes moving music, music video, online concert streaming, and karaoke onto a smart TV. For the music industry, this means, on the one hand, the subdivision of digital music scene services and the upgrading and improvement of To B commercial music services with the help of music streaming media platforms.

In addition to TME, during the pandemic, other music companies like Damai and Modern Sky are also trying to put their musical content on smart TVs, especially online concerts.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China’s prediction earlier, at the end of 2020, the market penetration of smart TV would be higher than 90%. With the pandemic as its catalysis, home music entertainment will surely see a lot more competition and creativity to come.