ByteDance Enters the Audiobook Market by Playing Voice from AI

Recently, ByteDance launched an App, called “Fanqie Changting” whose Slogan is “Free good Books, all in Fanqie”. This product plays a large number of authentic books in Fanqiexiaoshuo in the form of audio, and uses the voice of AI anchorman at the same time.

Also see: Who is Bytedance?

Fanqiechangting is divided into “boys” and “girls” in its products, which is a commonly used classification form of Chinese novels app and long-audio app, because there is a large gap between Chinese male and female users’ preference for novels, and a clear classification can help more people find works that suit them quickly. It is worth noting that, unlike some competitions, Fanqiechangting allows users to read novels in the text rather than just listen to AI.

Fanqiechangting also has to pay-to-go functions such as downloading content offline, and users who don’t pay will encounter ads during listening. This is one of the common business models for long audio products in China.

The long audio market has more than 400m users in China. In addition to established companies such as Himalaya FM, Dragonfly FM, and Lizhi FM, and also younger challengers include NetEase Cloud Music and Tencent’s Kuwochangting, Jike Xiaoyuzhou. Long audio content is more likely to occupy users’ fragment time than reading text, and there is more room for users to commute, take a lunch break and go to bed. Audio is more like music than video content, and its users can “multitask” in a mild brain environment.

Behind the prosperity of long audio is a large number of folk novel content that China began to accumulate in the 1980s, looking for more ways to realize it. In recent years, movies, television, and games adapted from all kinds of popular novels have been put online one after another, and newspaper novels and online novels, which were once loved by a small number of people, have begun to enter into a vast market.

The copyright of literary and artistic products in China is often centrally acquired by large capital groups, and it is China’s large Internet companies that are most keen on building an industrial chain of literature and art. Generally speaking, in China, the copyright of a novel and its derivative radio dramas, animations, TV dramas, movies, and games all belong to a large capital. This model is close to that of the United States, but quite different from that of China’s neighboring Japan.