- 2018-09-27
Smule connects the world through music
Smule, a world-renowned social media music company, was established in 2008. It is a developer of social music products on mobile phones. Its products include "Sing! Karaoke", "Magic Piano", etc. Its goal is "Connecting the world through music".
China (China) company Tencent Cloud India data center officially opened its service on March 28, 2018. This is the first large-scale data center deployed by Tencent Cloud in South Asia. It will be able to provide basic cloud computing products and large-scale computing, storage, network, security and other advantages for local companies in India and Chinese companies doing business in India. Advanced technology platforms such as data and artificial intelligence.
In addition, it will also bring Tencent Cloud's comprehensive solutions in the fields of video, finance, e-commerce, social networking, gaming, and industrial manufacturing to India, helping users to significantly save costs and time, and achieve business innovation and commercial success in the South Asian market.
Prior to this, Tencent Cloud had deployed CDN nodes in India to help users accelerate business distribution and create a good product experience.
Smule's APP "Sing! "benefit from it
Based on Tencent Cloud's CDN product in India, Sing! With a smooth K song experience, it quickly gained the favor of Indian users and ranked in the forefront of the Indian APP market for a long time. With the opening of Tencent Cloud's data center in India, Sing! From the computing level, it will once again gain the advantage of nearby deployment, and the user experience will be further guaranteed.
“Tencent Cloud’s products and architecture have a natural affinity for social applications. Smule has closely cooperated with Tencent Cloud based on this consideration. We have integrated Tencent Cloud’s superior technical capabilities to provide users with better quality User experience, this is a very important reason for "Sing!" to be successful in the Indian market." said Parker Ranney, Vice President of Operations at Smule.
It is worth mentioning that Smule plans to go public at the end of 2018. Smule has clearly stated its intentions: in the past few years, they have seen significant growth in the Internet sector in Southeast Asia, so they have tried their best to promote the company's international business growth, especially for the Southeast Asian market.
According to APP Annie data, in the US iPhone market in the past 5 months, Sing! Karaoke basically ranks between 5 and 10 among similar apps, and basically ranks among the top 3 in Thailand and India. According to its official website, in 2016, Smule's revenue was $101 million, an increase of 54% year-on-year. Among them, Southeast Asia has a market share of 40%, and North America has a market share of 30%. Its monthly active users reached 52 million, an increase of 52% year-on-year, while VIP subscribers increased by 100% year-on-year.
Smule’s VIP membership subscription fee is US$0.99 per month, and the annual fee is US$9.99. VIP permissions include the ability to remove advertisements while singing, and sing with the head singer.
Close interaction on social media enables rapid user growth
In Smule's view, the rapid growth of users in the past year is closely linked to the social interaction between users. Ordinary users can not only entertain themselves, but also use recording synthesis to pull pop singers to "play" together. Artists can also upload their songs to the platform to interact with fans to promote their music. The data shows that the average number of songs generated by the platform every day exceeds 20 million.
Smule has a navigator who loves music and understands the market, so you don't take a lot of wrongdoing. About a year after the company was founded, it launched mobile apps "T-pain" and "Ocarina": the former can change the voice of users and recorded 300,000 downloads in the first three weeks; the latter is a virtual ocarina, making mobile phones change As a musical instrument, it was a very attractive new thing at the time. Users can use these two apps to create and record works.
From Sing! Looking at the interface, the experience of music and singing is still at the core, Sing! The home page of Songbook is Songbook, which recommends popular songs according to different music styles. The sidebar includes Sing, Listen and Find Friends functions. In the K song mode, users can choose Solo (solo), Duet (dual singing) and Group. (chorus).
Users can invite friends to sing duet and chorus
Of course Sing! There are also social attributes, users can invite friends to sing duet and chorus, and they can also comment, share and like a certain song. During the tsunami and disaster in Japan in 2011, Smule passed Sing! Singing blessings from more than 5,000 people from all over the world. But from the perspective of product form, Sing! It is still a very good K song tool, and social networking is not the basis for its survival.
Sing! Dare to take the singing function as the core and not vigorously do social networking as a platform is confident, the confidence lies in the United States (United States) users' awareness and habits of paying.
A person in the music industry said that the management of copyrighted content in the United States is very strict, and that Smule's gameplay conforms to the U.S. policy and market environment, and is also accepted by users.
Let people enjoy the fun of music creation
In addition, the Smule team looks like a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Co-founder Wang Ge is a professor of music and computer science at Stanford University. Khu.sh, the company she founded, was acquired by Smule. Now Prerna Gupta, the product director of the latter, is also a music lover. She once said to the public: “Our goal is to let those who love music and those who don’t have the opportunity to learn music can To fully enjoy the fun of music creation, we always believe that humans are born musicians!"
At present, Smule has launched a variety of music products, most of which have never been seen before, except for Sing! There are also several karaoke applications: Autorap that automatically synthesizes speech sounds into Rap, Songify that automatically adjusts the human voice to suit the accompaniment, Magic Piano for piano, Ocarina for Ocarina, etc.
As Prerna Gupta said, Smule is making it easier for users to create beautiful music through various methods. Technology and creativity drive this company to be unique among music products.