This Man Single-Handedly Put NetEase Cloud Music on Track — Now He Wants to "Save" Baidu Music

But Baidu is not NetEase, and this is not 2012.

In the media's telling, Baidu Music went from "falling behind" and "abandoned" to "how it might reshape online music" and "whether it can return to its peak" in the space of ten months. All because of one man: Wang Lei.

Wang's reputation and Baidu Music's condition make a sharp contrast. Wang became senior director of NetEase Cloud Music in 2012 and grew it to 200 million users in three years. Those same four years were the four years Baidu Music fell apart, from giant of the MP3-search era to a leftover nobody wanted in the mobile age.

Success or failure, the reason was the product.

When NetEase Cloud Music launched in 2013, the market already had QQ Music, Kugou and Kuwo, Xiami Music and TTPod. In what looked like a red ocean, NetEase Cloud Music won a "small but beautiful" reputation — and 200 million users — with an interface that borrowed the look of vinyl records, tracks organized by playlist rather than by artist, and recommendations that mixed human editors with algorithms.

Baidu had no mature mobile team, and its product kept getting less friendly: the share button sat four levels deep, and the home page kept pushing square-dance megamixes. In the mobile era, Baidu Music was left behind completely.

If Baidu Music wants its old glory back, Wang looks like a good choice. His record at NetEase Cloud Music shows he knows what a good product looks like, and he has fought his way out of a crowded market before.

For Wang, Baidu Music may be another place to prove his worth.

Asked why he left NetEase Cloud Music, Wang mentioned personal reasons — driving to NetEase's new building and back took six hours — but also said the platform had grown mature enough to run without him, and that some of his own ideas were hard to realize there.

In an April 2015 report, Wang said NetEase Cloud Music would extend its services across the whole industry chain: fan economy, advertising, ticketing, digital music distribution revenue, value-added services built on music, smart hardware and more. He also said NetEase Cloud Music could not marshal the resources to do it.

For the full industry chain Wang imagines, Baidu Music looks more promising — behind it stands a company called Taihe Music. Late last year Baidu spun Baidu Music off, and it merged with Taihe Music.

Taihe Music is a capital-driven company that turned itself into a big one through a few large acquisitions.

Its businesses now cover almost the entire music industry chain: the record labels Taihe Maitian and Haidie Music, the copyright agency Dashi Music, the ticketing site Showstart, and the training school Haidie Forest.

Add Baidu Music itself as a player app, plus the Baidu Musician program that incubates independent artists, run by Liu Jin, formerly head of Douban Music, and no company in the music business seems to have a more complete set of pieces than Taihe Music.

Everything looks like a fit: Baidu Music needs Wang's experience, and Wang can use Taihe Music's pieces to realize his dream of turning a music player into a whole-industry-chain business.

Before any of that, though, the first thing Wang has to do at Baidu Music is patch it up.

The first patch is the product. As noted, Baidu Music has plenty of flaws; the buried share button is only one. On the product side, Wang may be doing the fixing more or less alone. After the spinoff the team kept most of its original staff, now reportedly just over 100 people.

On October 18, at the first press conference Wang held after joining Baidu Music, the first thing unveiled was version 5.9.0 of the Baidu Music app. It barely counted as a major update — before Wang arrived, the version number had already reached 5.8.1.

The other patch is copyright. On August 1 last year, the strictest copyright order the National Copyright Administration had ever issued took effect, and Baidu Music pulled 1.5 million songs, more than any other player on the market. That finished off a service already lagging in the mobile wave.

After Wang joined, Baidu Music signed a licensing deal with Tencent and planned to spend several hundred million yuan, with the goal of building "China's No. 1 music library."

As for the full industry chain, Wang has put forward a concept he calls the "Ear Economy Belt." The products and live events in it are still plans on paper; only the hardware — headphones co-branded with Nongke, Xiaoniao Audio and 1MORE — has actually shipped.

Wang says he "hasn't worked out what the further-out picture looks like," and for now has a two-year plan. He is careful about it, and will not give specifics.

What will Baidu Music look like in two years? No one can say, least of all because the market it faces is not an easy one.

In 2012, when NetEase decided to get into music, online music was still a loose pile of sand. By 2016 the consolidation is largely finished.

Tencent merged QQ Music with Ocean Music Group, owner of Kugou and Kuwo. Alibaba Music combined Xiami Music with TTPod and launched a sprawling, complicated piece of software called Ali Planet. And NetEase Cloud Music, the product Wang built himself, has just raised 1 billion yuan — and become the target he now has to beat.

The giants in this market are equipped and ready for the next round of the war. Baidu Music, apart from what looks like a first step on copyright, still seems to have nothing.

Wang says Baidu Music is still in the top four, with 2 million paying users. Even so: the product urgently needs repair; the musician program Douban never pulled off has to be built again from nothing; making money from hardware needs more time to prove itself; and connecting the whole industry chain depends on how Baidu Music and Taihe Music behind it fit together.

All of it now sits in front of Wang. How much time does he have to repeat NetEase Cloud Music's success at Baidu Music?

Q: QDaily

W: Wang Lei

Q: Looking back at that moment now — founding NetEase Cloud Music in 2012 — do you see it any differently?

W: Not really. From where I sit there's still a similarity. Chinese music products still aren't good enough. They're a bit better than four years ago, but still not good enough — I mean good to the point where almost nobody has a bad word for you... I can't claim that what I did before, or what I'm about to do, will get there. But that's the direction we're going to push in.

Q: Which areas specifically?

W: Build a music product in China and the first thing you can't escape is copyright — you need a fairly large library. However good your product is, without a big enough library it's useless. So that's a problem you have to keep facing.

Second, design and ease of use. Obviously that has to keep getting better.

Third, whether you do the so-called O2O part around the product well, and the peripheral part.

Fourth, keeping up with where technology is going overall — whether you should be doing livestreaming, VR production, whether you should be combining with other new technologies that haven't appeared yet but are about to. I think everyone has to face these.

As for music right now, it's still at a fairly early stage — still step one. Everyone is still competing on how big their library is. In China we really are still at that first stage.

Q: So mostly still adding features to the player.

W: Right. Honestly, if it keeps developing along this line, it'll end up no different from Chinese soccer. Really. If this stays the model, that's genuinely sad. Everyone should try to break out of it, look further ahead, work in other directions — not just stare at this one thing, meaning copyright, right? Otherwise it's Chinese soccer.

Q: When did you personally start hearing so much good music?

W: I've listened to pop music since I was a kid. In fifth grade I bought the first cassette of my life, Cui Jian's Rock 'n' Roll on the New Long March.

Then in the early '90s — I grew up in Beijing — Beijing radio stations started running regular programs on Hong Kong and Taiwan music and Western music, which was just getting going then. I remember 1991 was the year Beijing got its first real program devoted to Hong Kong and Taiwan pop. The station was called Beijing Economic Radio — it doesn't seem to exist anymore — and the show ran at 10 p.m. on Friday or Saturday, hosted by Chang Kuan.

So I think growing up in Beijing gave me the chance to hear all this. From middle school on I was exposed to a lot of different music, though only a handful of kinds. Electronic music, for instance — I was probably one of the earlier people in China to get into it, around 1998.

Q: You'd graduated by 1998, hadn't you?

W: No, still in college. In the summer of 1995, when I was in my second year of high school, I was already going to rock parties — underground rock, people called it, underground shows. Tickets were ten yuan, I remember, and it really was underground: in Xinjiekou — was it Xinjiekou? — in a disco that was literally in a basement. A basement disco, an underground show. I was going to those in my second year of high school.

Q: Any bands there who later got famous?

W: That was the day I met Shen Lihui. Led me astray, that did. When Modern Sky magazine relaunched, they interviewed me, because in theory I was the person who wrote the most for it. A lot of people don't know that a lot of what they read in there was mine — a lot of the articles in that magazine were written by college students. At that show — not many people went to shows then — there were maybe five or six bands, or six or seven, I don't quite remember. Not many people altogether, a hundred and something, under 200. The musicians got on well with each other, unlike now, when plenty of them look down on each other and there's zero contact — zero contact even on the same bill.

I was fearless back then, not shy at all: "Can we get your contact details?" He pulled out a business card. No cell phone on it, just a pager and a landline. It said Beijing Fengjing Technology and Culture Company, general manager Shen Lihui — a printing plant, a printing company.

By the time I started college — I got a recommended-admission place at Capital Normal University — we were still in touch over that summer. I went to find him again, and he said come by whenever, listen to music. So I'd go to his office to listen. His office was on the West Third Ring Road then, next to Capital Normal University, also in a basement. We'd talk, listen to whatever, and talking with him was interesting. They were rehearsing that summer too, and he let me come and watch.

I was Modern Sky's so-called fourth employee, maybe the third — I honestly can't remember, third or fourth — but part-time, working while I was in college. So really, because I loved music I happened to meet some people, and the people I happened to meet pointed me in a pretty good direction.

Q: And then you went into media, naturally enough?

W: While I was in college I had several part-time jobs at once. At Modern Sky I did copywriting, planning and production-assistant work, though we weren't recording every day, it wasn't a daily thing. At the same time I was a part-time reporter at Beijing's Youth Daily, which had just started a weekly called Beijing Youth Weekly. I was also a part-time reporter for Audio-Visual World, Fan World and Music Paradise. Back then I could interview one person and get two or three pieces out of it, because you weren't allowed to submit the same piece to more than one outlet — you had to write about the same person or event from different angles and place each version somewhere different. Sometimes it didn't work, though; sometimes there just wasn't the appetite. Writing about rock, for instance, was hard to place in Fan World but went down well at Music Paradise.

I was juggling several things like that, and in my junior year I started part-time at a website. The site is gone now, but at the time it was probably China's first rock-music site, Chineserock.com. Gone now; two Americans founded it. I worked there as a part-time reporter. You could say a good part of what I'd call my first pot of gold came from there — that was when I first felt what it was like for a website to pay a salary that high, and my first business trip ever came from that job.

Q: After you left traditional newspapers you spent some time at a record company. What were you mainly responsible for?

W: First, why did I leave the newspaper business? The main reason I left media was that I'd already moved into entertainment news, music news, and the whole field was turning into gossip. Gossip disgusted me. I believe writing about music should be about the work, not about gossip. I'll grant that readers should get different kinds of reading pleasure, but not every piece of entertainment and music news should turn into gossip — that's what I personally couldn't stand. Back then I felt journalistic ideals weren't worth a damn next to gossip, and it depressed me. That's the first reason.

The second: in my last year in media I was already moonlighting at Tian Zhen's company. The paper knew, because it had nothing to do with my actual job — I was already trying my hand at making records on the side. I'd had a stretch of that at Modern Sky, then another stretch at Tian Zhen's company, and I realized making records was what genuinely interested me. For those two reasons I left traditional media for a record company. I did work as a manager for a while — I managed Mao Ning at one point, Ai Jing later, among others — but what I really wanted wasn't managing, it was records, the making and the writing themselves. So later on I mostly did work outside artist management. I found it more interesting, and I worked on a lot of records, for several years.

By the time I left the record industry in 2007, the industry had started falling into a trough — a real trough. Back then websites paid record companies nothing for copyright, no licensing fees at all. Record companies still had to live off the traditional CD sales channel. Ringback tones were a business by then, but the songs that worked for that were the more mainland-flavored ones, and not every company could produce those.

Q: You said records were in decline then. Is the situation better now?

W: I'd put it like this: the music industry as a whole is much better than it was. But record sales specifically — CD sales, I mean — not necessarily; those have fallen further since those years. The overall industry is much better, though. The clearest sign, the biggest and most obvious one, is that these platforms now pay record companies for copyright, and pay a lot, which is what has kept the whole industry alive. Better overall, I think, with one condition: companies genuinely in this business, genuinely making good music, will do well. Don't make good music and you won't.

Q: I know some record companies aren't happy about it — they say it cut off their income.

W: That's hard to say, actually. Talking about a cut-off income is clinging to the past, and I come from a record company myself. What people mean by "cut off our income" mainly refers to the era when music platforms paid record companies no licensing fees at all. That era did have the problem — around 2006, 2007, 2008.

But later, and especially now that music platforms pay record companies hundreds of millions of yuan in licensing fees, you can't call it cut-off income anymore. Or put it the other way: can you make every music platform in the world vanish overnight and send human society back to when everyone bought CDs? Not possible anymore. And even if every platform disappeared, would listeners really go out and buy CDs? Not necessarily, right?

Q: You've said before that the industry negotiates to settle the payment question.

W: Right — the monthly subscriptions, especially where the three major catalogues are involved. The three of them have a relatively unified standard, so it's the same for everyone: 8 yuan, 12 yuan, that sort of thing.

That price is set mainly by the three major labels together with these music platforms. Independent musicians' work is priced by each platform on its own.

Each platform signs them and sets its own prices. But in practice everyone looks at everyone else's standard when they price, so the gaps aren't large.

Q: Which listeners are most willing to pay?

W: First, fans, definitely — the Bigbang, EXO type of thing, fan-driven individuals, they're willing. Second, heavy music enthusiasts. Those two.

Q: Beyond that, what other directions are there for paid revenue?

W: Personally I think peripheral products and hardware. We've started on that already — when I talked about it before we hadn't, and now, look, we have. Tickets too; I think users are willing to pay for these. In one sentence: music, and things around music, are what users will pay for. Even with what we call music e-commerce now, we won't stray far from music itself. If one day you see us selling rice, Baidu Music-brand rice, that would look odd — though I won't rule it out entirely. Say one of the artists we work with, Li Jian, my good friend Li Jian — if Li Jian made some eco-friendly rice and said, sell it on your platform, I think that would work fine. Baidu Music Li Jian Music Rice. Entirely possible, right?

Q: Still centered on music, then.

W: Right, mainly on music. Look at what we're carrying now: we sell tickets to Jacky Cheung's concerts, we sell headphones, we sell digital albums. We sell memberships. In the future we might add categories — notebooks, pens, power banks, T-shirts, all possible. But a lot of it is still built around music itself.

Q: Why are there so few breakout songs or artists now?

W: That's a very good question, because it's a hard one to answer clearly. First, in terms of how Chinese society has developed, China is no longer a single-track or two-track society; it's fully plural. In a plural society, people have far too many ways and channels to choose from for living and for entertainment. Music used to be an unusually important vessel, something that went along with your life. Back when a family couldn't afford a television, having one radio at home made you feel you owned the world, right? Now, with the economy and living standards where they are, people have far too many choices in consumer electronics alone. They have more and more ways to get entertainment. So music's important place, its once-irreplaceable place, has been shaken. That's the first thing. The second is that people no longer use music as an emotional anchor the way they did. Why did people buy music back then? They treated it as an emotional anchor. People don't do that now, or you could say people in this era have gone fairly numb emotionally. So music isn't as important either.

The last point, and I think it's a bitter fruit of all these years of development, a consequence we have to carry today: for so many years people have not paid to get music, and that makes it feel cheap. Once something feels cheap, it stops being important. That's a shift in people's psychology, I think — my own view. On that last question, of course, some people say a depressed industry drove talented musicians out of it, so no good musicians come up anymore. I don't fully agree. Take Li Ronghao — hasn't he been shouldering it in this industry for ten years? People think he broke out overnight; he actually spent ten years in the business first. He was a production assistant at the record company I worked for. So it's not that there's no talent in this industry, and it's not that these people aren't working hard at writing songs. But society and people's psychology really have shifted a great deal. How many successful music outlets were there in China in the past? Really, how many. Now there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even more than a million. Count personal WeChat accounts and you're at ten million, maybe a hundred million. So the more choices you have, the less you know what to choose.

I feel this strongly. Work has taken me to Japan a lot these past few years. Japan's technology is clearly well ahead of ours. But in how people's minds have changed, I think the Japanese are far more conservative than we are — "conservative" in quotation marks, meaning they hold on to a lot. So in culture and the arts, music included, they've kept many of their traditions. They still buy CDs, right? They still have the biggest record store in the world, in Shibuya — a commercial street that busy, and there stands a seven-story record store, the biggest in the world, seven floors. Think about the logic; you don't need to understand business to see it. If you couldn't sell CDs you couldn't even pay the rent on that building, right? But it has been running for years, which proves plenty of people still buy CDs, right? It's not as if some VC heard a story and wrote a check, right? So on this front — I studied history, by the way — I think we're still living through a restless era, and I don't think it will pass soon. Maybe once it does, once society settles down — I don't mean the growth rate settling down, I mean the development of the whole social and cultural structure, people's state of mind settling down — things will get better.

Q: How should musicians promote themselves today?

W: Musicians today have far, far more channels to promote themselves than they used to, and far more options. First, they can work with all of these music platforms, every one of them, uploading their music and putting their bios, their copy and their news on those platforms. Then social media — blogs, Weibo, WeChat, including WeChat official accounts now — all vehicles for promoting yourself. And one more, at least 70 years old and a bit clumsy: touring everywhere. Counting from the US it really does go back more than 70 years. Large-scale touring in America started around the 1930s; there was some in the '20s, but scattered. Real large-scale touring came in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when musicians started touring heavily everywhere. So although it looks crude, traditional, labor-intensive, it's still something you absolutely have to do.

Q: Even trendy hip-hop artists tour.

W: Right, and folk singers do an enormous amount of it. For instance — I'm flying out tomorrow for Chen Li's concert; she hasn't been well these past few days and canceled, so I'll catch the next stop. I've watched her touring hard lately, two or three cities a week by the look of it. You can see how heavy it is, and it's still indispensable. Especially for original musicians who want a name, or want to break out, or want their songs accepted by listeners — it's a necessary step.