Top of the Great Era

Chapter 2072 Audiobook

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

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

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

However, during the National Day holiday in October, Zhou Buqi still arranged tourist visas for them, and asked Sun Guanran to take them to Hawaii for a while, and even allocated them a luxury yacht.

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

A one-time asking price of 6.2 million US dollars!
Of that, $4 million was cash.

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

If it is a game studio in the United States, its backbone will be much stronger, and its bargaining power will be extremely strong.First of all, the US has such a big market, as long as the product is good, there is no need to worry about selling it; second, there are many game companies in the US, and if they don’t sell to Changyou, they can also sell to other companies.

outfit7 is a small company in Cyprus. Although "Talking Cat" is very popular in the market, they also launched "Cat Family" for this reason, but there are still huge risks at the operational level.

The simplest one, there are too many games that imitate "Talking Cat" in the market.There are too many imitations, and with outfit7's own strength, it doesn't have the money or energy to fight an intellectual property lawsuit.

Selling to a big company is the best choice.

After some communication, the negotiation was more pleasant.

Mattrick confidently assures that he will be able to take down outfit7, as Zhou Buqi as the chairman of Changyou's board of directors and a good start after he becomes Changyou's CEO!

At the same time, Ziweixing International also successfully acquired the knowledge service product Knol from Google for US$950 million, including a 19-person team behind this product.

However, compared with the real blockbuster deals, this is all small business.

On October 10, Google officially announced that it had completed the acquisition of Twitter at a total price of 12 billion US dollars.There is no doubt that this will be the most shocking transaction this year.

Zhou Buqi, who got the news, was having a family gathering on a private island in Greece.This is a small island borrowed from Buffett. The family vacationed here, and my parents, aunt Liu and my sister also came.

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

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

Zhou Buqi almost shed tears.

Wen Zhixia and Shi Jinglin may have discussed it, and they walked over one by one, and then pinched him fiercely, one on his arm and the other on his waist.

Zhou Buqi felt guilty, and had to put on a smile, saying that although he had a wedding with Sister Bao, the bridal chamber wedding party was spent with them, which drew Shi Jinglin's big eyes again, as if someone cares .

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

There is a very important task, which is to attract Shi Jinglin and try to have a child.If possible, it would be best to bring Senior Sister Zhen Yu along.

On vacation, Europe is more comfortable.

There are many countries, rich cultures, and a long history. Going to any place has a history of hundreds of years, which is more suitable for leisure and vacation.Zhou Buqi mainly stayed in Europe.

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

During this period of time, he intends to turn around all the mainstream countries in Europe.

However, there are also things to do at work.

When he arrived in Sweden, he was stopped by Spotify boss Daniel Eck.

This buddy is a fan of Arsenal, and he complained when he came up. In the last round of the league, Manchester United scored 3:0 away and defeated the opponent without bloodshed.

This makes every gun fan very distressed.

Now Arsenal is heavily in debt and has to sell core players every year to make ends meet, which has led to a serious decline in the team's performance. Let alone the championship, it is not bad to keep the top four and get the Champions League.

Zhou Buqi followed Ning Lu at Spotify's headquarters, laughing at him, "You can change your team to support. If you change to a Manchester United fan, I'll give you a jersey signed by all Manchester United players."

Daniel Eck was speechless.

After the pleasantries, it's time to talk about business, which must be related to Spotify.

There are three things in total.

One, financing.

This is easy to say, the previous rounds of Spotify’s financing were all participated in by Ziweixing, and had the priority and lead investment rights for further investment. Basically, Spotify has been locked in the “Ziweixing” series.

Two, Daniel Eck wants to push Spotify into the domestic market.

Zhou Buqi disagreed with this idea, "It's better not to do this."

"We can cooperate with Ziweixing."

Daniel Ike knew that Ziwei Star had a music product called "Midian Music", which was very well-known in the domestic market, and it was considered a music product second only to QQ Music.

But he thinks Spotify should be better.

This is a world-class product with more music rights.

Zhou Buqi waved his hand, telling him to let go of this idea first. He doesn't understand the domestic Internet market at all, which is completely different from Spotify's way of playing overseas.

Moreover, QQ Music and Weidian Music are already very good, which is enough to meet the needs of domestic music lovers, and there is no need to cooperate with Spotify.

As for those foreign music copyrights that only Spotify has, but QQ Music and Weidian Music do not have...

It can only be said that Daniel Aike is overthinking and doesn't understand the domestic environment at all.

First of all, there are domestic music lovers. Few listen to foreign songs, and even fewer listen to unpopular songs.Therefore, like QQ Music and Weidian Music, they mainly compete for the copyright of Mandarin songs and Cantonese songs, and add some Korean Wave songs at most.

This basically satisfies 99% of the audience.

It costs less.

It is not necessary to cover almost all song copyrights like Spotify, but to take care of various languages ​​around the world.

As for domestic listeners who want to listen to foreign songs, and QQ Music and Weidian Music have no copyright...then it is even simpler, just download pirated versions from the Internet.Daniel Eck thought it would be Spotify's competition, but that's not the case at all.

Instead, this would be Spotify's biggest weakness!

Ten years later, Spotify has nearly 2 million global users and is still losing money, but some well-known domestic music products can make a lot of money.

Mainly because of the copyright factor.

Spotify has to purchase all legal copies.

Domestic music products, in fact, only need to purchase the copyrights of most mainstream songs, and there is no need for copyrights of unpopular songs.Anyone who wants to listen to it can listen to the pirated version.A product that can meet 90% of the needs is enough.

In this way, the cost of buying copyright can be greatly reduced.

With less spending, profits can be generated.

And this is also related to the third point Daniel Eck said, "Recently, podcast products are very popular, and this is a trend."

"podcast?"

Zhou Buqi raised his eyebrows.

What kind of trend is this?
At the beginning, Williams and Jack Dorsey mainly wanted to make a podcast product when they started their business, but they didn't succeed.As a result, as I was doing it, I found that the Twitter created by Dorsey had a chance to make a big splash, so I simply gave up the podcast and started Twitter.

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

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

Daniel Aike sighed, "Spotify's profitability is really too difficult. After a while, some membership fees and advertising fees were collected and handed over to the upstream copyright company. For more than half a year, I have been studying the platform you mentioned. I think it is very good that the economy should have the theory of 'self-operated + third-party'."

Zhou Buqi smiled, "Of course, there have been many practical demonstrations. Not to mention anything else, after Netflix's self-produced series... such as "House of Cards" is launched, the stock price will inevitably skyrocket."

Daniel Eck nodded, "I agree, so I think Spotify should also have certain self-operated products. If it is all third-party music, it will pay copyright fees if there is income, and it will be difficult to generate profits. But even so , Many artists and singers are still complaining about the low income, as if we made money from them."

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

This idea is really jumping.

Spotify is now a music platform, and it is almost impossible to do self-operation. It is too big a leap for them to make their own music.

Netflix can make self-made dramas, but Spotify cannot make self-made music, which is mainly determined by the attributes of the industry.

The film industry is relatively fragmented, and there are too many film companies. There are thousands of them in Hollywood alone.

The music industry is too concentrated, and the four giants, Sony Records, Universal Music, Warner Music, and Top [-] Records, almost monopolize the entire market.

This led to all the singers being signed to the four major labels.

Even if Spotify wants to operate on its own, it doesn't have the resources.

It is really difficult to carve up profits from a monopoly industry.

Therefore, Daniel Eck thought of another idea-audio book service.

It is too difficult to make music, but it is too easy to make audiobooks. There is almost no threshold for this thing, just buy the audio copyright of the book, and then find someone to record it.

In the global book industry, the sales of paper books and e-books are distributed as royalties according to the sales volume.However, in the adaptation rights, it is generally a buyout model, and at most a net profit dividend is added.

Net profit dividend means that profits are generated, and 3% or 5% profit dividends can be given, and no dividends will be given if there is no profit.

That's just so friendly.

Buy out the copyright and keep it in your own pocket. If you earn money, you don’t need to hand it over to the upstream copyright dealer.

However, is this business reliable?
Zhou Buqi is really a little uncertain.

He doesn't know much.

The only thing I know is that there are some audiobook products in China in later generations. among the losses.

(End of this chapter)