Pulling Chaoyue Yang's broadcast performance, fewer people listening to ...

On November 15, Tencent Music Entertainment Group (hereinafter referred to as "Tencent Music") released its third quarter results before the market, and this time it used the virtual AI singer "Beyond AI" to broadcast the results. This time, the virtual AI singer "Beyond AI" was used to make the announcement. The singer, based on Chaoyue Yang, was created by the voice synthesis engine of Tencent Music's Kugou Music. While the announcement is new, the performance itself is both worrying and happy. On the one hand, Tencent Music's profitability is improving. In the third quarter, Tencent Music achieved revenue of 7.37 billion yuan, down 5.6% year-on-year. However, net profit was 1.09 billion yuan, up 38.7% year-over-year. Under non-IFRS (Non-IFRS), net profit was 1.41 billion yuan, up 32.7% year-on-year. On the worrying side, Tencent Music's active user base is declining. In the third quarter, Tencent Music's online music service had 587 million mobile MAUs (monthly active users), down 7.7% year-over-year, and its social entertainment service had 155 million mobile MAUs, down 24.4% year-over-year. Online music services are mainly about listening to songs, while social entertainment services include live streaming, Karaoke, etc. Both services are seeing a decline in active users, meaning that the online music platforms themselves are less attractive than before. This change is not hard to understand in an era when Jitterbug and Crypto are on the rise. Short videos have long been a black hole of time, and it's too difficult to grab people with Shake and Fast. Although in order to enhance user stickiness, Tencent Music, NetEase Cloud Music and other platforms have added more diverse services and content, the core competitiveness, however, has not become stronger as a result. According to the latest report of QuestMobile, in September 2022, the proportion of user hours of mobile video to the total hours of mobile Internet users reached 35.7%, an increase of 0.7% year-on-year. In addition, except for mobile social products, which saw an increase in user hours, user hours in other areas either did not increase or decreased. The key to the survival of music platforms after that is still in the most fundamental listening service. From Tencent Music's earnings report, on the one hand, active users have become less, on the other hand, the profits earned have become more, and the main reason for this is the increase in listening to songs paid users. In the third quarter, the number of paid users of Tencent Music's online music service was 85.3 million, compared with 71.2 million a year earlier, an increase of 14.1 million, or 19.8%. How to firmly attract these music lovers and further increase the proportion of paying users has become the most important test for Tencent Music.