Li Mu attaches great importance to matters related to joint headphones, so Milky Way Technology contacted two German companies, Sennheiser and Baia Dynamics on the same day, vaguely revealing Makino Technology's intention to customize more than one million pairs of mid-to-high-end headphones from their companies. The two companies responded to Makino Technology in the shortest time, demonstrating their admiration for Makino Technology, the great Internet company, and their expectations for cooperation with Makino Technology.

So, Fang Xudong temporarily dispatched four targeted R&D personnel from the hardware laboratory and prepared to set off for Germany with the business team of Makino Technology.

Before the team set off, Li Mu held a small meeting with them. On the one hand, he wished them a smooth journey and a successful completion of the task. On the other hand, he reiterated the core goals of this customized headphone plan to everyone again.

This is the first time that customizing joint headphones is a world-wide electronic products with music as the main body.

Li Mu hopes to enhance the sound quality of mango-me2 and its cost-effectiveness in the eyes of consumers through joint cooperation with headphone manufacturers. In addition, through joint cooperation with headphone manufacturers with high-quality customized headphones, the core gap between mango-me2 and competitors can be widened. Since customized headphones are not sold separately, if consumers are interested in this unique headphone, the only channel is to buy a mango-me2, or buy it from the user of mango-me2.

However, Li Mu was not planning to match all mango-me2s with a custom headset like this. He was planning to divide each model of mango-me2 into two versions, one is the regular version and the other is the luxury version. The ordinary version is matched with the original ordinary headset of mango-me, and the luxury version is matched with future joint customized headsets.

The reason for the distinction is mainly because the increase in costs indicates that the terminal price will also increase. In many developing countries and regions, including China, consumers generally lack purchasing power, so adding the additional mango-me2 with customized headphones may add a considerable burden to ordinary consumers, so we need to give them a cheaper choice.

At present, domestic music lovers rarely buy high-end players and headphones. For most consumers who use mp3 to listen to music, most of them use earphones with a price of less than 50 yuan. More people use headphones for no more than 20 yuan. Similarly, the expensive ipods are also very average in China. Most consumers who like music are even reluctant to spend a few hundred yuan to buy an mp3, which can often cost thousands or even thousands of yuan. In the mainland, they are only the choice of a very small number of high-end players.

However, in developed Western countries, the sales volume of high-end players such as ipod is still very amazing. The price of a few hundred dollars is not a big deal for music lovers in developed countries. The simple design, huge storage space, excellent sound quality and high-end style of ipod are extremely attractive to these affordable consumers.

However, even for Apple IPOD, its hardware cost is mainly concentrated on the body itself, and the quality of the matching headphones is relatively average, and the sound quality is not outstanding. At best, it is the level of headphones worth a hundred yuan per person.

The mango-me2, which has added a joint customized headset, is to compete headline with it in the target market of ipod. At that time, the joint customized headset will become an important part of the mango-me2's sound quality crushing ipod, and it will take a long time window for Apple to catch up.

If Apple discovers that it uses the Mango-me2, which has a customized headphones with well-known manufacturers, is much ahead of the ipod in sound quality, and Apple has only two ways of dealing with it, either lowering the price or catching up. Li Mu is least afraid of it. If Apple dares to reduce the price of the ipod to zero profit or even extremely low profit, then Apple will strangle its own money to death. Therefore, Apple's only real effective way of dealing with it is to catch up.

However, it is not that easy to catch up with the hardware. Li Mu is the first thing that is certain is that Apple does not have a headphone production line. If you want to upgrade Apple headphones, then what it can do is to entrust companies that do headphone OEMs for them to upgrade Apple headphones. This is not something that can be done in a few days. Even if it is rushing to get started, it will probably take at least several weeks.

Moreover, upgrading headphones means an increase in overall costs for Apple. If Apple passes this additional cost on consumers, the price disadvantage of the ipod will increase. If Apple bears this part of the cost itself, its profit margin will be greatly affected.

Still the same thing, Li Mu can lose money to buy and sell players at this stage, but Apple at this stage is not good, this is its fatal point!

...

After leaving for a small team in Germany, Li Mu also needs to make final preparations for the launch of yytunes. The most important one is to finally confirm the payment process and payment channels of yytunes.

In countries and regions with great copyright protection overseas, the popularity of paying for music is very high. However, the traditional way of payment is to purchase genuine physical albums, whether it is tape, CD, md, Apple's Itunes just started trying to pay for online music this year, and it is now a small result, but after all, it has just started and is not yet mature, so yytunes has a great chance of catching up.

Since Makino Technology is extremely well-known worldwide and has the highest number of users in the Internet field, yytunes is very attractive to record companies. Therefore, Makino Technology is much more attractive to record companies than Apple, which has just started to build an online music store. When Makino Technology contacted these record companies and hoped to obtain their authorization to sell online music and share profits with them, almost no record company refused to cooperate. Compared with Apple, some record companies are still in the hesitation and waiting stage, so before yytunes has been launched, its copyright library has surpassed Apple, which has just started.

At present, yytunes has obtained copyright authorization from most record companies around the world and has fully digitized these music. At the same time, technicians have stored three different versions in yytunes' own database according to Li Mu's requirements. The three versions are divided based on sound quality, namely: standard, high, and extremely high.

There are two ways to sell music in yytunes: download and purchase, and monthly purchase.

In yytunes, singles and albums need to be purchased separately. For online listening, you only need to pay a fixed monthly fee. Online listening does not need to pay for individual songs. You only need to pay a certain amount per month to become a member of yytunes and listen to any song in the online music library for free.

Like itunes, yytunes also adopts a profit sharing ratio of 3:7 with record companies. For example, the download price of a song is $0.99. For each song is paid to download, the record company will take away $0.69 and give most of the profits to the record company in order to bring more digital copyright revenue to the record company and thereby increase the overall scale of the music industry.

The monthly account sharing adopts the "play number and account sharing" logic designed by Li Mu. For example, the monthly fee of yytunes is US$9.9. In June this year, there were 10 million users who booked the monthly account, and generated 99 million US dollars in June. According to the distribution ratio of 3:7, the total amount to be distributed to the record company is US$69.3 million. In early July, the platform will calculate the monthly account number of June. For example, there are 10 million monthly users on the entire platform. In the past June, a total of 1 billion views were generated. Then, the 69.3 million dollars distributed to the record company, divided by one billion times, to calculate the revenue share of the single playback.

The monthly user's single playback account calculated based on this is US$0.069. If a record company authorized a total of 20,000 songs and played a total of 2 million songs in June, the company will receive a share of US$138,600 in June. If a single of a popular singer played a total of 10 million times in June, then the share of this single in just one month can reach US$690,000.

This set of settlement logic of "play counting accounts" has been recognized by all record companies. They were originally worried that the distribution of monthly income would be uneven and unfair, but based on this set of settlement logic, they don't have to worry at all.

Li Mu did all this not only to snipe Apple, but also to support the development of the music industry, which stems from his absolute respect for creation and intellectual property rights.

In order to enhance the promotion of the music industry, Li Mu also specially opened the path for independent musicians to apply for entry in yytunes. If an independent musician wants to sell his music through yytunes, he can apply for a musician account in the background and upload his music content. After review, his songs will be listed in yytunes. Independent musicians can increase their income by selling music on yytunes.

Most original singers have a very difficult life, not only in the mainland, but also in the world. For an original singer who has no company packaging and no financial support, if he wants to record an original song, he must first complete the lyrics and song creation, then try to arrange the song himself, or spend money to hire someone to arrange the song. After the arrangement is completed, he also needs to spend money to hire professional musicians to record accompaniment for himself, such as guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, and other instrumental music, harmony. After the musicians gather together, they will pay a sum to rent a recording studio, which will be recorded in the studio, and after the post-processing, it will be made into a record. Many original singers will lose money when recording a song, let alone record a whole album.

For such musicians, what they need most is a channel to monetize with music. Otherwise, when their creations are not rewarded, it will be difficult for them to continue to stick to their musical path, and they are likely to say goodbye to music. The songs he could have created will be still in the womb. No one knows how much good music can a guy sitting in front of a computer or writing codes in a restaurant if he walks on the musical path.

However, for these people, traditional forms of music are too difficult to monetize, and they can only achieve it by signing contracts with record companies. Now, they can achieve rapid monetization through yytunes. Moreover, yytunes will rely on yy's powerful traffic in the future and will definitely become an opportunity platform for original musicians to go from grassroots to popularity.

However, these charging methods were only implemented in countries and regions with developed economies or copyright protection in the first stage of yytunes launch, and these are mainly developed Western countries, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Therefore, the payment channel currently adopted by yytunes is the payment pal settled in US dollars, followed by the electronic credit card payment channels of Visa and Master-card. Although Alipay has also been connected to yytunes, Li Mu estimated that Alipay will basically not have many users to use, which is mainly because he knew in his heart that it is impossible to expect Chinese netizens to pay for online music at this stage.

In China, yytunes was launched under the name "yy music", and the first phase of its launch was completely free.

The reason why it is completely free is because Li Mu knew that if yy music was forcibly charged in China, it would basically end up with one: death, and death is very fast.

Domestic intellectual property protection is far from being able to eliminate piracy, and even the crackdown on piracy is only a tickling stage. More importantly, domestic users are deeply rooted in the concept that online music should be free at this stage and do not have the soil for charging.

Li Mu himself was helpless about this, but there was no effective method, so he could only allow users to accept free genuine music for free, and then implement paid music when the market and legal conditions allow it in the future.

In order to make record companies willing to provide free online auditions and downloads to Chinese users in China, Li Mu specially added several advertising sections to yy music. In the future, these advertisements will be used to pay advertising for medium and large enterprises with sufficient social credit, and all advertising revenue will be used to subsidize record companies. At that time, the dual mode of "play times, download times" will be adopted to fairly and impartially allocate advertising costs to major record companies.

Advertising revenue is naturally much less than paid revenue. These record companies also know that in this way, they actually don’t have much money. At least the revenue scale lacks imagination space, but if you look at the problem from another dimension, everything will suddenly become clear.

After all, there is no record company in the world that can earn digital copyright income in China, especially in mainland China. The revenue from music products is pitifully low due to the strong impact of piracy. Therefore, if Li Mu does not agree to Li Mu's cooperation plan, their music will still be listened to and downloaded on the Internet in China, and no one gives them a dime. Li Mu will at least use all the advertising income to subsidize them. Who will not be able to get along with the money?
Chapter completed!