Li Mu attaches great importance to the related matters of co-branded headphones, so animal husbandry technology on the same day with Sennheiser and Beyerdynamics, two German companies, got in touch, vaguely revealed that Makino Technology intends to customize more than one million pairs of high-end headphones from their enterprises, these two companies have replied to Makino Technology in the shortest possible time, showing their admiration for Makino Technology, a great Internet company, and the expectation of cooperation with Makino Technology.

As a result, Fang Xudong temporarily transferred four directional R&D personnel from the hardware laboratory to prepare to leave for Germany together with the business team of Makino Technology.

Before the team set off, Li Mu held a small meeting with them, on the one hand, wishing them a smooth journey and successful completion of the task, and on the other hand, reiterating the core goal of this customized headset project.

The operation of customizing co-branded headphones is the first time in various electronic products with music as the main body in the world.

Li Mu hopes to enhance the sound quality of Mango-ME2 through co-branded cooperation with headphone manufacturers, as well as its cost-effectiveness in the eyes of consumers, and through co-branding with headphone manufacturers to cooperate with high-quality customized headphones, it can also open the core gap between Mango-ME2 and competing products, because customized headphones are not sold separately, so if consumers are interested in this unique headset, the only channel is to buy a Mango-ME2, or buy it from the user of Mango-ME2。

However, Li Mu is not ready to match all Mango-ME2 with one of these custom headphones, he is ready to divide each model of Mango-ME2 into two versions, one is the ordinary version, the other is the luxury version, the ordinary version is matched with the original ordinary headphones of Mango-ME, and the luxury version is matched with the future co-branded custom headphones.

The reason for the distinction is mainly because the increase in cost indicates that the terminal price will also increase, and in many developing countries and regions, including Huaxia, the purchasing power of consumers is generally insufficient, so the additional Mango-ME2 of customized headphones may add a lot of burden to ordinary consumers, so it is necessary to give them a cheaper option.

At present, domestic music lovers rarely buy high-end players and headphones, for most of the consumers who use MP3 to listen to songs, the vast majority of them are using earbuds with a price of less than 50 yuan, and more people use headphones that do not exceed 20 yuan, the same way, the expensive iPod sales in China are also very general, most of the consumers who like music are even reluctant to spend hundreds of dollars to buy an MP3, and the iPod of thousands or even thousands of yuan is only the choice of a very small number of high-end players in the mainland.

However, in the developed countries of the West, the sales of high-end players such as iPods are still very amazing, and the price of a few hundred dollars is not a large amount for music lovers in developed countries, and the simple design, huge storage space, excellent sound quality and high force of the iPod have a great appeal to these affordable consumers.

However, even if it is an Apple iPod, its hardware cost is mainly concentrated in the fuselage itself, and the quality of the supporting headphones is relatively average, and the sound quality is not outstanding, at best, it is the level of a headphone of 100 yuan.

The main goal of the Mango-ME2 is to compete head-on with the iPod in its target market, and at that time, the co-branded custom headphones will become an important part of the Mango-ME2's crushing iPod in terms of sound quality, and Apple will need a long window of time to catch up.

If Apple finds that it uses Mango-ME2, which is co-branded with well-known manufacturers, is much ahead of the iPod in terms of sound quality, there are only two ways for Apple to deal with it, either to reduce the price, or to catch up, Li Mu is the least afraid of its price reduction, if Apple dares to reduce the price of the iPod to zero profit or even very low profit, then Apple itself will strangle its own money, so, Apple's really effective way to deal with it is only to catch up.

However, it is not so easy to catch up in hardware, Li Mu is first sure that Apple does not have its own headphone production line, if you want to upgrade Apple headphones, then what it can do is to entrust them to do headphone OEM companies to upgrade Apple headphones, this is not something that can be completed in a few days, even if it is rushed to launch, I am afraid it will take at least a few weeks.

Moreover, upgrading headphones means an increase in comprehensive costs for Apple, if Apple passes on this additional cost to consumers, the disadvantage of iPod in price will increase, and if Apple bears this part of the cost, then its profit margin will be greatly affected.

is still the same sentence, Li Mu at this stage can lose money to buy and sell players, but Apple at this stage can't, this is its dead end!

……

The small team that went to Germany set off, and Li Mu also had to make final preparations for the launch of YYtunes, the most important of which was to finally confirm the payment process and payment channels of YYtunes.

In countries and regions with great overseas copyright protection, the popularity of paying for music is very high, but the traditional way to pay is to buy genuine physical albums, whether it is a tape or CD, MD, Apple's itunes just started to try online music payment this year, and now it is a little effective, but after all, it has just started and is not yet mature, so YYtunes has a great chance of catching up.

Due to the high popularity of Makino Technology in the world, the number of users is the first in the Internet field, so YYtunes has a very great attraction to record companies, so the attraction of Makino Technology to record companies is much greater than Apple, which has just started to do online music stores, when Makino Technology contacted these record companies, hoping to get their authorization to sell music online, and when they shared profits, almost no record companies refused to cooperate, compared to Apple, some record companies are still in the hesitation and wait-and-see stage, so, YYtunes has not yet been launched, its copyright library has surpassed that of Apple, which is just starting out.

At present, YYtunes has obtained the copyright authorization of most record companies in the world, and the music has been fully digitized, and at the same time, according to Li Mu's requirements, the technicians have stored three different versions in YYtunes' own database, and 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 purchase and monthly purchase.

In YYtunes, the download of singles and albums needs to be purchased separately, and for online audition, you only need to pay a fixed fee on a monthly basis, and online audition does not need to pay for a separate song, you only need to pay a certain amount every month, you can become a member of YYtunes, and listen to any song in the music library online for free.

For example, a song is priced at $0.99 for downloads, and the record company will take $0.69 for each song that is paid for download, giving most of the profits to the record label, so as to bring more digital rights revenue to the record company, thereby increasing the overall scale of the music industry.

For example, YYtunes monthly subscription fee is 9.9 US dollars, and there are 10 million users in June this year, and a monthly income of 99 million US dollars was generated in June, according to 3:7, the amount to be distributed to the record company is a total of 69.3 million US dollars, and at the beginning of July, the platform will account for the number of monthly playbacks in June, for example, the entire platform has 10 million monthly users, and in the past 6 months, a total of one billion plays have been generated, so the 69.3 million US dollars allocated to the record company are divided by one billion times to calculate the revenue share that a single play should give to the record company.

If a record company licenses a total of 20,000 songs, and the 20,000 songs are played 2 million times in June, then the company will receive $138,600 in revenue in June, and if a hit artist's single is played 10 million times in June, then the share of this single in a month alone can reach $690,000.

This set of "playback number sharing" settlement logic 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 settlement logic, they don't have to worry about it at all.

Li Mu does all this, not only to snipe at 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 deliberately opened the path for independent musicians to apply for entry in YYtunes, if there is an independent musician who wants to sell his music through YYtunes, he can apply for an artist account in the background and upload his own music content, after review, his songs will be listed in YYtunes, and independent musicians can increase their income by selling music in YYtunes.

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 songwriting, and then try to arrange it himself, or spend money to hire someone to arrange the music, and after the arrangement is completed, he also has 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 get together, they pay a sum of money to rent a recording studio, which is recorded by the studio, post-processed, and then filled into a record, and many original singers go bankrupt when they record 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 creation is not rewarded, it will be difficult for them to continue to adhere to their own music path, and it is very likely that they will say goodbye to music, and the songs he could have created will also be stillborn, no one knows, a guy sitting in front of the computer writing code, or a guy brushing dishes in a restaurant, if he embarks on the road of music, how much good music can be brought to the masses.

However, for these people, it is too difficult to monetize music in traditional form, and he can only achieve it by signing a contract with a record company, but now, they can achieve rapid monetization through YYtunes, and YYtunes will be able to become an opportunity platform for original musicians to go from grassroots to popularity with the strong traffic of YY in the future.

However, in the first phase of YYtunes' launch, these charging methods are only implemented in economically developed countries and regions where copyright protection has passed, and this is mainly in western developed countries, as well as Japan and South Korea.

Therefore, the current payment channel adopted by YYtunes, the core is PayPal settled in US dollars, followed by VISA and Master-Card's respective credit card electronic payment channels, although Alipay is also connected to YYtunes, but Li Mu estimates that Alipay will basically not have many users to use, mainly because he knows in his heart that at this stage it is impossible to expect Chinese netizens to pay for online music.

In Huaxia, YYtunes was launched under the name "YY Music", and the first stage of the launch was completely free.

The reason why it is completely free is because Li Mu knows in his heart that if YY Music forcibly charges in China, it will basically end up in one place: death, and death will be fast.

The protection of intellectual property rights in China is far from the extent of eliminating piracy, and even the crackdown on piracy is still only at the stage of tickling, and more importantly, domestic users at this stage have a deep-rooted concept that online music should be free, and there is no soil for charging at all.

Regarding this point, Li Mu himself is also very helpless, but there is no effective way, so he can only free it first, let users accept free genuine music, and wait for the future market and legal conditions to allow, and then implement paid music.

In order to make the record company willing to provide free online audition and download for Chinese users in the Huaxia area, Li Mu has added several advertising sections in YY music, and in the future, these advertisements will all be used to pay for medium and large-scale enterprises with sufficient social credit, and the advertising revenue will all be taken out to subsidize the record company.

Advertising revenue is naturally much less than paid income, and these record companies also know in their hearts that in this way, they can't actually share too much money, at least the scale of income lacks imagination, 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 Huaxia, especially in the mainland of China, and the income from music products is pitifully small because of the strong impact of piracy, so if they don't agree to Li Mu's cooperation plan, their music will still be auditioned and downloaded on the Internet in Huaxia, and no one will give them a dime, Li Mu will at least use all the advertising revenue to subsidize them, who will not be able to get along with the money?

At this stage, Apple's iTunes has only carried out music payment business in the United States, and they are now in the stage of crossing the river by feeling the stones, according to the trajectory of historical development, they will expand this business to the United Kingdom next year, and then gradually expand to more countries, but, for Makino Technology, with the support of global products such as YY, and the global data processing center that has been built, YYtunes in the first stage of the launch, you can be in North America, Western Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea simultaneously launched the paid business, and this speed is definitely a spike level for Apple at this stage.