Author: Wilderness Elegy

In fact, on this business trip, Zhou Buqi, the new secretary, didn’t bring any of them.

On this business trip, a very important thing is to get married.

The fewer people who know about this private matter, the better.

However, during the National Day holiday in October, Zhou Buqi still arranged travel visas for them, and asked Sun Wanran to take them to Hawaii for a tour. They even got a luxury yacht for them.

Zhou Buqi traveled from South Korea, the United States, to the United Kingdom, Germany, and then to Cyprus to hold talks with the team of outfit7, the developer of the "Talking Cat" game.

A one-time asking price of US$620 million!

Of this amount, US$400 million is in cash.

This is the weakness of a small country with few people, and its negotiation ability is relatively poor.

If it were a game studio in the United States, it would have a much stronger backbone and extremely strong bargaining power. First of all, the United States has such a big market, and as long as the product is good, it will not worry about selling it; secondly, there are many game companies in the United States, and they will not sell to Changyou.

, and can also be sold to other companies.

Outfit7 is a small company in Cyprus. Although "Talking Cat" is very popular in the market and they also launched "Cat Family", there are still huge risks at the operational level.

The simplest one is that there are too many games that imitate "Talking Cat" in the market. There are too many imitations. With outfit7's own strength, it has no money or energy to fight an intellectual property lawsuit.

Selling to a big company is the best option.

After some communication, the negotiation became more pleasant.

Mattrick confidently guaranteed that he would be able to take down outfit7. As Zhou Buqi's appointment as Changyou's chairman of the board of directors, he would have a good start as Changyou's CEO!

At the same time, Ziweixing International also succeeded successfully, buying the knowledge service product Knol from Google for US$9.5 million, including a 19-person team behind the product.

However, this is nothing compared to the real blockbuster deal.

On October 12, Google officially announced that it had completed the acquisition of Twitter for a total price of US$20.027 billion. There is no doubt that this will be the most shocking transaction this year.

When Zhou Buqi got the news, he was having a family gathering on a private island in Greece. This was a small island borrowed from Buffett. The family was vacationing here, and his parents, Aunt Liu and sister also came.

Here, Zhou Buqi quietly held a small family wedding with Sister Bao.

The moment she saw her daughter put on her wedding dress, Aunt Xue burst into tears.

Zhou Buqi almost shed tears.

Wen Zhixia and Shi Jinglin may have agreed upon it. They walked over to him one by one and pinched him hard, one by his arm and the other by his waist.

Zhou Buqi felt guilty and had to put on a smile, saying that although he and Sister Bao had a wedding, he would spend the wedding night with them, which earned Shi Jinglin a big eye roll, as if no one cared about it.

.

After the wedding, Boss Zhou went on a one-month vacation.

There is a very important task, which is to rope in Shi Jinglin and try to have a child. If possible, it is best to rope in Senior Sister Zhen Yu.

When it comes to vacations, Europe is more comfortable.

There are many countries, rich cultures, and long histories. You can find hundreds of years of history in any place you go, which is more suitable for leisure and vacation. Zhou Buqi mainly stayed in Europe.

When there is a Manchester United game, I go to watch the game at home, and then fly back to the European continent.

During this period, he plans to visit all mainstream countries in Europe.

However, work is inevitable.

When I arrived in Sweden, I was stopped by Daniel Ek, the boss of Spotify.

This guy is an Arsenal fan, and he complained about it. In the last round of the league, Manchester United defeated the opponent with a score of 3:0 in an away game.

This troubles every gun fan.

Arsenal is now burdened with debt and has to sell core players every year to stay afloat, which has led to a serious decline in the team's performance. Let alone competing for the championship, it would be good to keep the top four and win the Champions League.

Zhou Buqi followed Ning Lu at Spotify's headquarters and laughed with him, "You can support another team. If you become a Manchester United fan, I will give you a jersey signed by all Manchester United players."

Daniel Ek was speechless.

After the pleasantries, we got down to business, which must be related to Spotify.

Three things in total.

1. Financing.

It’s easy to say that in the previous rounds of Spotify’s financing, Ziweixing participated in the entire process and had the priority and lead rights for further investment. Spotify has basically been locked into the “Ziweixing” series.

Second, Daniel Ek wants to push Spotify into the domestic market.

Zhou Buqi didn't agree with this idea, "It's best not to do this."

"We can cooperate with Ziweixing."

Daniel Ek knew that Ziweixing has a music product called "Weidian Music", which is very well-known in the domestic market and is second only to QQ Music.

But he believes Spotify should be better.

This is a world class product with more music rights.

Zhou Buqi waved his hand and asked him to put down this idea. He didn't understand the domestic Internet market at all, which was completely different from Spotify's overseas strategy.

Moreover, like QQ Music and Weidian Music, they are already very good and can meet the needs of domestic music lovers. There is no need to cooperate with Spotify.

As for those foreign music copyrights that are only available on Spotify but not on QQ Music or Weidian Music...

It can only be said that Daniel Ek is overthinking and does not understand the domestic environment at all.

First of all, domestic music lovers listen to relatively few foreign songs, and even less popular songs. Therefore, QQ Music and Weidian Music mainly compete for the copyright of Mandarin songs and Cantonese songs, and at most add some

Korean pop songs.

This can basically satisfy 99% of the audience.

Spend less money.

It doesn't have to cover almost all song copyrights like Spotify, and it has to take care of various languages ​​around the world.

As for domestic listeners who want to listen to foreign songs, but QQ Music and Weidian Music do not have copyrights... it would be even simpler, just download pirated versions online. Daniel Ek thought this would become Spotify's competitiveness, but in fact

That's not the case at all.

On the contrary, this will become Spotify's biggest weakness!

Ten years later, Spotify has nearly 200 million users worldwide, and it is still losing money. However, some well-known domestic music products are making a lot of money.

The main reason is copyright.

Spotify wants to purchase all genuine copies.

For domestic music products, you only need to purchase the copyrights of most mainstream songs. There is no need to own the copyrights of unpopular songs. Whoever wants to listen can just listen to pirated copies. One product can meet 90% of the needs.

That's enough.

In this way, the expenditure on purchasing copyrights can be greatly reduced.

Reduce expenses and generate profits.

And this is also related to the third point that Daniel Ek said, "Podcast products are very popular recently. This is a trend."

"podcast?"

Zhou Buqi raised his eyebrows.

What kind of trend is this?

At the beginning, Williams, Jack Dorsey and others started their business mainly because they wanted to make a podcast product, but they tried it again and again without success. As a result, as they continued to do it, they found that Twitter, which Dorsey created, had the opportunity to achieve great success.

I simply gave up podcasting and started Twitter.

Daniel Ek said: "It's an audiobook service."

"Ah?" Zhou Buqi twitched the corner of his mouth, "Is this okay?"

Daniel Ek sighed, "It's really difficult for Spotify to make money. I managed to collect some membership fees and advertising fees, but all of them were handed over to the upstream copyright company. I have been studying the platform you mentioned for more than half a year.

The economy should have the theory of 'self-operation + third party', which I think is very good."

Zhou Buqi smiled, "Of course, there have been many practical demonstrations. If nothing else, once Netflix's self-made dramas... such as "House of Cards" are launched, the stock price will inevitably skyrocket."

Daniel Ek nodded, "I agree, so I think Spotify should also have certain self-operated products. If it is all third-party music, any revenue will have to be paid royalties, and it will be difficult to generate profits. But even so

, many artists and singers are still complaining about too little income, as if we made money from them."

Zhou Buqi opened his eyes wide, "So you want to make an audio book?"

This train of thought is really exciting.

Spotify is now a music platform. It is almost impossible to operate on its own. It would be a huge leap to let them produce their own music.

Netflix can produce self-produced dramas, but Spotify cannot produce self-produced music. This is mainly determined by the nature of the industry.

The film industry is relatively fragmented, with too many film companies, including thousands in Hollywood alone.

The music industry is too concentrated. The four giants, Sony Records, Universal Records, Warner Records, and Top 100 Records, have almost monopolized the entire market.

This resulted in all the singers being signed to the four major records.
To be continued...