Last week's Tencent TMEA Music Entertainment Festival is still going strong.
The awards ceremony contributed a lot of famous scenes, such as: Jay Chou, who has not been seen for a long time, brought the golden song skewer; Mayday, Liu Ruoying sang "later"; Cai Xukun, the era of teenagers and other new power idols to show the beauty of the world.
But what completes the "topic KPI" for this entertainment event is the list of "Top 10 Hot Songs" announced at the awards ceremony.
The list of the "Top Ten Hot Songs" was released, and it quickly led to a wave of "voices" on all major platforms.
The netizens, like a pot of explosives, have been distressed: "The Chinese music world is finished", "I would like to sincerely pray that the Chinese music world can be regressed for 15 years.
The outrage over the "Top 10 Hottest Songs" has really embarrassed the Chinese music industry, which has always boasted "no shortage of good songs" and "always improving".
How come after a whole year of hard work, the "Top Ten" is still at this level at the end of the year?
"Ten hot songs" led to the "large face farce", in fact, is the Chinese music industry trough and short boards of a concentrated exposure.
Through the phenomenon to see the essence, let's take a deeper look, this list in the end and hit the face of who hurt?
The first slap is definitely on the hot songs on the list.
The so-called top ten hits of the year were spat on, and even reviled, and not without reason.
A closer look at the list of winners reveals that all ten were more or less "black":
Deep Sea Caviar's "Thousands and Thousands" was challenged as a plagiarized copy of Lan Yu's "The Last Time I Was Tender";
"I Can't Wake Up, I Can't Go Back" is the most popular song of the year, and it's the first of its kind in the world.
"Can't Wake Up Dreaming" has been questioned as a plagiarized copy of Supremes' "Cotton Candy";
"Clear the Air" has been questioned as a plagiarized copy of EXO's "Mermaid's Tears".
What's more, there are a number of "hits" in one.
If you compare the melody of "White Moonlight and Vermilion Sand Mole" carefully, you can hear the shadows of "contentment", "said goodbye to face", "love magic", "left eyelid jumping", "Yuzuizaka" and many other songs.
It's like the second "Tailor" song after "Sorrow for the Departed".
Although it is difficult to identify plagiarism in music creation, it is easy to see that these "top ten hits" all have the shadow of the once-hot hit songs.
People's mature music market, the popularity of the wind direction has been refurbished a few rounds: hiphop, psychedelic rock, reggae, experimental electronics ....... The music industry has been in a state of flux for a long time now.
In such a striking and eye-catching contrast, the uniformity and lack of progress of domestic musicians in melodic creation is even more of a "slap in the face".
What's even worse is that these Netflix songs are often "dead in the water".
This Tencent TMEA Entertainment Festival for the "Top Ten Hot Songs" arranged for each person 15s hot song skewer, without the sound card and filter support, each song is a large car scene, breath is not stable, run sound broken sound and other problems are endless.
In fact, the short video platform on the killing of the net red singer, pulled to the stage on the real wheat singing live "social death" situation, has long been commonplace.
The second slap in the face of the "Top Ten" fell on the award show.
Let's take a look at last year's "Top 10 Hits" from the ceremony.
The list was the same as this year's, with "The Girl on the Bridge," "Mango," and "It's a Big World or You," all of which are brainwashing songs that have proliferated on short-form video platforms.
Moving forward, the 2019 Top 10 Golden Hits and Top 10 Hot 100 lists haven't been separated yet, but they're still the same.
This phenomenon is more or less embedded in some kind of irony: together, the Chinese music scene is half-assed at the end of the year.
The first of these online songs was a hit, and the first one went viral, but behind the brainwashing melody was a "bad" melody and a shoddy remix arrangement that didn't stand up to scrutiny at all.
This kind of bad songs and songs of the gods, actually appear on the annual list in a dignified manner, shouldn't our platforms and organizations reflect on this?
In the music section of the B station, there have been a number of sarcastic "tutorials" on how to make a song.
"Teach you to write a hit song in 3 minutes", "how to get a ballad in ten minutes", "a minute to write a Qianlong cabbage", such tutorials can be found everywhere.
Ten minutes to create a flow of more than a million million "network songs", such a simple and rough production process, the quality of the song is muddy.
So, the third slap in the face of the "Top 10" is a slap in the face of the sinking market.
It's a place where creators and companies make a lot of money, while our listeners are left in the dark.
So with this kind of "windfall", the entertainment industry has hatched a large number of companies that produce "short video brainwashing songs" on an assembly line.
Unlike traditional music production companies, they utilize a real-time hotspot monitoring system to write songs, and the fastest it takes to write a song is 4 hours, and the slowest it takes is only 24 hours.
In a nutshell, they write what's hot.
In the case of many professional musicians who can't wait ten years for a hit song, this company can exaggerate to a month to create a "hit song" in the short video platform, and a song can often create a million dollars or even higher level of income.
There are even music studios that sign up a group of songwriters to work on the charts every day, and then quickly produce songs in similar styles.
Even Xu Liang, who used to be one of QQ Music's "Big Three," opened a music production company and went behind the scenes to make short-form music videos. A lot of people thought he had disappeared, but he just changed his vest to make more songs in bulk.
In such a completely traffic- and money-oriented creative process, the "music work" has become a "music product". And from the listener's point of view, the music and melodies they hear are bound to become more and more simple and verbalized.
In recent years, the "claws" have begun to tentatively reach out to the mainstream music market, and some so-called "popular singers" have begun to appear on a variety of "high-profile" audio programs. "The first thing you need to do is to get your hands dirty.
Li Yuanjie, the creator of "Sorrow of the departed", participated in the large-scale music talent show "The Son of Tomorrow 2" in the hope that he could become "the second Mao Yiqiu".
The "deep smoke voice" of the next door Laofan, who frequently appeared on the stage of the ace music competition program.
The old man next door, who said "I don't like to sing", is proud of his work, "homogenization" is exposed, and can't help but be repeatedly scrutinized, and is the product of the aesthetics of a lonely audience, and is doomed to fade into oblivion.
In "The Sound of Heaven", the critic's assessment of next door Laofan is also very pertinent, "I recognize the sincerity and hard work of next door Laofan, but the platform will use such a huge amount of traffic to make his not-so-good works into a hit, the successor, which will be a hindrance".
The slap in the face that corresponds to the proliferation of mouth-watering songs like the Top 10 hits is the decline of the mainstream singing scene, and it's the one that hurts the most and is the hardest!
The era of "Zhou Wang Lin Tao" is coming to an end, but there are very few new singers who can play, and Brilliance's songs are very artistic but out of touch with the public; Zhou Shen has already set up an OST professional, but there are few non-commercial songs. The first time I've seen this, I've seen a lot of people who have been in the same boat for a long time.
It's hard to imagine that 21 years after Jay Chou's debut, he still has 54 songs in the Top 100 list of the hottest songs in the Mainland in 2021, as announced by the Apple Music app.
It's 2021, and most of Jay's fans have already started their own families, while Jay himself actually still occupies half of the Chinese music scene.
Although Jay himself has been lying down, every day, "wife and children hot bed", not easy to live, but the mainstream singing world has been in the foreground of the situation, which is not the Chinese music industry is another kind of slap in the face.
In fact, it is not difficult to find that, in the Chinese music world is "frequent face" behind, is the capital of the music market hostage, is the public in the "fast consumption" era of aesthetic sinking.
Admittedly, in the era of "fast consumption", even entertainment is "short", from "long video" to "short video", from "short video" to "short video", from "short video" to "short video", from "short video" to "short video", from "short video" to "short video", from "short video" to "short video".
In the era of "fast consumption", even entertainment is "ephemeral", from "long video" to "short video", from "TV drama" to "short drama"; visual arts can diversify to adapt to the times, and no matter how long or short, there will be excellent works.
But for music, which has a "threshold of appreciation", this rapid transformation is almost devastating.
The formation of music itself and the development of musical literacy is a "slow process" that requires musicians to spend a long time learning music theory and polishing their singing skills before they can produce good work.
And in the era of "fast consumption", music has to start paying attention to the timeliness, and what was hot yesterday may not be hot today.
That's why music has become so popular and fast.
There is also a music producer confessed, "The first day of the heart is like water in the short video has heat, the next day there is a company with money, went to the singer's home to sign the copyright."
"It can't be helped, the heat of the song is just curved down, and if you don't catch it you may have passed this wave of heat."
Another major reason for the proliferation of "lip service" songs is the sophisticated algorithms of the big data era.
Li Zongsheng, the godfather of the singing world, painfully put forward the "pig food theory" at the Golden Melody Forum: If you feed him pig food, he will become a pig. You feed him bad taste songs, he will always be like this.
In the era of big data, the dissemination of songs began to have a drastic change in the way, in the past, the explosion of a song to rely on the television or radio station's recommendation, the singer frequently show up to play the song, the album to be able to sell, to be in the streets and alleys of the store to play.
And now, Netflix production companies can first use big data in short video platforms to cast a wide net, "viral" dissemination of these mouthfuls of songs, large-scale brainwashing of users, and then extended to the major music platforms and entertainment platforms, to achieve the full platform of the whole user coverage.
The "Top 10 Hits" is, to some extent, a selection of big data.
For the sake of bread, a lot of musicians can only put down their dreams for the time being and submit to the status quo. From this point of view, the "top ten hits" is not a slap in the face to this overly impetuous "big data era".
Is it really the big data and short video industry that has made the Chinese music industry "repeatedly hit the face"? In fact, the choice of big data is still based on the choice of the audience.
These top 10 songs are not just the choice of big data, they are the choice of the public.
With the rapid development of Internet entertainment, there are more and more entertainment options available to the public, in a variety of forms, so people's pleasure thresholds are getting higher and higher, and they need more and more short-lived, intense stimulation to stimulate their senses.
This makes the musicians in this status quo have to seek mutation, as Deng Ziqi in the variety show said: "You can not hook three seconds, people will row you away."
How many people can still listen to a new song in its entirety without brushing the short video or watching the stage? And how many people can actively break through the "information barriers" surrounded by big data, and take the initiative to jump out of the comfort zone in search of a good new song?
From another perspective, in the past, it was the record companies and media companies that decided what the public would listen to; now, in the self-publishing environment, the choice is more in the hands of the listener.
So the Top 10 reflects the real choices.
Compared to other mature music markets, there is a general lack of music education and aesthetics.
In fact, this phenomenon is quite normal, think of the music class since childhood, either occupied by language and math teachers, or used for self-study.
Under these circumstances, the sinking of music aesthetics seems inevitable. We sit here mocking the Chinese music scene for getting slapped in the face, and it's not like we're the ones getting slapped in the face.
In the words of musician Liang Huan, "Tencent's Top 10 list is the truest form of public opinion, representing the widest range of musical aesthetics. No matter where you are in the chain of contempt, it's pointless to judge downward, and if such a lowly product of civilization as the chain of contempt is really meaningful, it's for climbing upward."
So instead of lamenting that the Chinese music scene is dead, we should be strengthening our music education, improving our own music literacy, and thinking about what we can do to keep the Chinese music scene, and this era, from being punched in the face over and over again.