Chapter 93

As soon as the acceptance letter arrived, good things began to happen one after another.

Zhao Kang also received his acceptance letter; there was no real suspense about his admission to the junior college he had applied for.

Then, the first round of the final of Simple Plan was finally broadcast.

This time, it was truly a huge success. Previously, the recordings of Simple Plan's performances were only broadcast on Nansu TV, but now, not only Nansu TV, but also Yanjing TV and more than a dozen other cooperative TV stations across the country were broadcasting it.

The song "Old Boy" captivated the hearts of the nation with its excellent composition and inspiring, touching lyrics on the day it was broadcast.

The traffic on Yiting.com was also unprecedented. The excellent user experience and the reward system for registered users attracted a large number of users to Yiting.com, and the speed of this growth was even beyond Li Mu's own expectations.

Seeing tens of thousands of comments about the four members of Simple Plan on Yiting.com, Li Mu had a sudden idea.

Why not create a celebrity forum on Yiting.com for fans to play with?

Since he had already preempted Baidu MP3, he might as well preempt Baidu Tieba as well.

Li Mu carefully analyzed the future Baidu Tieba. In the future, Baidu Tieba would rely on the search engine, so the rules for creating a tieba were basically completely open. Not only singers and celebrities, but any object or term could have a tieba.

However, he didn't have a search engine to rely on, so he couldn't create such a massive product, let alone the powerful software and hardware support required.

Therefore, Li Mu decided to open a tieba function on Yiting.com, but in the first stage, it would be limited to singers. This meant that every user who came to Yiting.com to listen to music would find a secondary page for each singer. Now, Li Mu wanted to add a personal tieba for each singer, which would stimulate fan discussions and further increase user stickiness.

The most interesting part was that the domain name for the tieba was also in Li Mu's hands...

Li Mu immediately called Kong Lingyu: "Old Kong, I have a new idea. Listen carefully, and raise any questions after I finish."

Kong Lingyu knew that his young boss often had some incredible but brilliant ideas, so he immediately grabbed a pen and paper, held the phone between his shoulder and face, and said, "Go ahead."

"Currently, our users can only leave comments on each celebrity's secondary page. Although there are many comments, they are one-way and closed, and cannot form social interactions among fans. So, my idea is to develop a new feature for fans, a minimalist BBS where they can discuss their idols, but it must not be as complicated as a BBS forum."

Kong Lingyu was taken aback for a moment and asked, "Boss, do you mean to create a minimalist BBS for each singer?"

"Exactly."

Li Mu smiled, "This minimalist BBS only needs to support text and image posts. In other words, we will develop a template and open one for each singer. Unlike the broad BBS forums, each of our minimalist BBS will have a very specific focus, the singer himself."

Kong Lingyu's eyes lit up, "Then, let each singer's fans chat and discuss in the singer's minimalist BBS, essentially giving each singer's fans a home on the internet?"

"Something like that," Li Mu smiled, "We won't call it a BBS or a 'network home'—that sounds too俗 (vulgar). We'll keep it simple and call it a tieba."

"Tieba? What does that mean?"

"You must know what a bar is, right?"

Kong Lingyu's voice immediately became excited, "I get it! My God, Boss, you're a genius! How does your brain work? If this tieba is developed and launched, Yiting.com will truly become the online gathering place for music fans across the country!"

Li Mu smiled, "The tieba is the first step into the community. You must take it seriously and quickly come up with a product concept. I'll visit Jinling in the next few days to discuss it with you."

...

The day after the official version of "Old Boy" was launched, Simple Plan set off for Yanjing again. Starting today, the song was being played non-stop on major radio stations!

This was a song that resonated with people of all ages, from teenagers to adults, and the lead singer, Zhang Kexuan, was a handsome guy. After being broadcast on so many TV stations, there was no reason for the song not to become a hit.

Soon, the entire mainland pop music scene was shocked by the band called Simple Plan. Before the first round of the final in Yanjing was broadcast, few people in the pop music industry knew about Simple Plan. Even when "Li Bai" and "Sunflower" were climbing the charts on a few radio stations, they didn't attract much attention from industry insiders. However, "Old Boy" directly brought Simple Plan to the national audience, and at this point, industry insiders were surprised to find that Simple Plan was present on the popularity charts of major radio stations, and they occupied three positions on the charts.

"Old Boy" topped the charts across the country, "Li Bai" with its slightly rebellious tone ranked second on most charts and third on a few, while the inspiring "Sunflower" was consistently in the top five.

The pop music industry hadn't seen such a chart-dominating phenomenon in a long time.

Zhou Jielun would definitely be one in the future, but unfortunately, his first album "JAY" had just achieved initial success in Taiwan, and the Taiwanese music industry was still in shock. Zhou Jielun's truly popular album "Fantasy" wouldn't be released until September, so if he wanted to become a sensation on the mainland, it would be at least early 2002.

Currently, it was a great opportunity to make a name in the music industry. Unlike the future, Li Mu never expected that "Mu Zi," who had been relatively unpopular on Yiting.com, would suddenly become a sensation nationwide, and the reason turned out to be a blatant copyright infringement.

It turned out that a popular CCTV program called "Artistic Life" mainly interviewed well-known artists in China, following an emotional and touching route. In a recent episode, they interviewed a famous singer who, while recalling his deceased wife, used "When You Are Old" by Mu Zi as the background music.

When the music played, it perfectly complemented the emotional theme, moving countless viewers to tears. After the program aired, many people searched for the background music online, and they all ended up on Yiting.com's Mu Zi.

The number of plays for "When You Are Old" on Yiting.com increased exponentially, and it also boosted the popularity of "Zebra, Zebra." Seeing the numerous positive comments from netizens about "When You Are Old," Li Mu felt a bit proud.

As for CCTV using the song without permission, Li Mu had no negative feelings. The environment at the time was such that TV stations and radio stations rarely obtained authorization to play songs, but this unlicensed broadcasting also created many well-known stars, a characteristic of the era.

In a very short time, "When You Are Old" climbed the charts at an unimaginable speed. Now, four of the top ten songs on major music charts were exclusive to Yiting.com, and even though they were pirated by many websites, it didn't matter. Li Mu's scarcity marketing made users clearly understand that Yiting.com was the official release site for Simple Plan and Mu Zi's music.

What Li Mu didn't expect was that Yiting.com's unexpected success would cause Baidu to start evaluating the prospects of MP3 services half a year earlier than in the previous life.

Baidu officially launched its MP3 search service in September 2002, but the project began evaluation half a year earlier.

At that time, Baidu had already detected a sharp increase in internet users' demand for music searches. They found that a large number of music search users were being redirected to various pirated music websites through Baidu's search engine. Baidu believed that if they retained these users, it would significantly boost Baidu's traffic and user stickiness, so Baidu MP3 was born. Once launched, it almost intercepted all users searching for music on Baidu.

At that time, other websites had not yet gained significant recognition, and 80% or more of their user traffic relied on Baidu search. Therefore, once Baidu controlled the source of user traffic, it was like choking their throats.

However, this phenomenon was not a big problem for Yiting.com. Its users were directly converted through various promotions, and most accessed Yiting.com by directly entering the Eting domain, rather than going through Baidu. So, Baidu couldn't control Yiting.com's lifeline.

This internal evaluation at Baidu quickly solidified the decision to develop MP3 search. During the evaluation meeting, when the data since Yiting.com's launch was presented, all the dissenting voices immediately disappeared.

One voice at the meeting said, "Yiting.com's development momentum is quite strong. I've also observed their promotional strategies, product development, unique music, website operations, and user retention. Based on their data, it's clear that this brand and team have a very promising future. Why don't we just acquire them?"

A senior executive shook his head, "This team is too young, and their services are too单一 (singular). User retention will be a big issue in the future. Besides, they are currently lucky and have no rivals. Once we launch MP3 search, their traffic will plummet. In fact, I believe that once Baidu launches MP3 search and download services, all websites in this field will essentially be dead!"

It's unknown what he would think when he saw Yiting.com's tieba launch a few days later...

The vice president, who had been silent for a while, suddenly spoke, "Immediately organize a technical team to develop MP3 search in a closed environment, aiming to launch within three months. At the same time, closely monitor Yiting.com's development. If their traffic exceeds one million, inform me immediately!"