Long-video giants are "mass-producing" music festivals, who else can create the next blockbuster live IP?
The long holiday period with the most concentrated music performance market is coming again, but the industry has shown obvious differentiation this year. Headliner concerts and mature performance IPs remain hot, while a large number of mid-tier music festivals are decreasing.
The industry carnival supported by "revenge viewing" and emotional dividends in the previous stage is facing challenges. The *2026 H1 National Performance Market Development Brief* released by China Performance Industry Association shows that the box office revenue of commercial performances across the country in the first half of 2026 reached 30.408 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.41%.
Large-scale concerts and music festivals with more than 5,000 attendees took 17.111 billion yuan in box office, accounting for the majority of the total. A large number of music live events that have not built public attention and recognition are facing an unprecedented wave of elimination.
According to incomplete statistics from Music Finance, a total of 106 music festivals were held across the country in the first half of 2026, with a total box office of more than 980 million yuan. Compared with 148 sessions and nearly 1.7 billion yuan in box office in the same period of 2024, the number of sessions decreased by nearly 30%, and the box office shrank by more than 40%. The contraction of large-scale outdoor projects is particularly obvious: during this year's May Day holiday, only more than 10 large-scale outdoor music festivals were held in China, a sharp decrease compared with the scale of more than 30 sessions in the same period of previous years.
On the one hand, top-tier concerts still see tickets sold out as soon as they are released; on the other hand, small and medium-sized organizers are withdrawing in batches, and the postponement and cancellation of music festivals have become the norm. Instead, performance IPs from internet and video platforms are getting longer-lasting and larger in scale.
Bilibili's Bilibili Macro Link (BML) has been running for 14 years, and its Graduation Concert has been held for 6 sessions. Data shows that the latter attracted nearly 30,000 on-site attendees this year, with online reservations exceeding 3.6 million; the Soda Music Festival continued to expand this year, following the expansion pace of 32 sessions in 17 cities in 2025; Tencent Music recently held the 7th TMEA Tencent Music Entertainment Awards and the 2nd JUMP PARK Music Festival; Damai held the 5th Xiami Music Festival by the seaside in Aranya, and reports say that it has attracted 30 brand partners this year including Taobao 88VIP, Samsung, and Volkswagen...
While traditional performance organizers are still repeatedly calculating the business accounts of a music festival to prepare for the risk of sudden cancellation, platform-backed performance IPs seem to operate with a different logic.
From Superstars to IPs,
Music performances are seeking new scarcity
In the past few years, the industry has gone through several rounds of experience upgrading. As the market expands, more and more music festivals have begun to add elements such as markets, camping, art installations, and fashion brand collaborations, hoping to transform from pure music performances into comprehensive lifestyle consumption scenarios.
The 2026 Green Heart Forest Music Festival expanded its content to six sections: commercial performances, film exhibitions, art activities, creative markets, camping and leisure, and check-in installations, building a 3,000-square-meter market area and a 5,700-square-meter camping leisure area. Similar operations have become the standard configuration of music festivals in the past two to three years.
However, the changes at this stage are mostly adding extra content outside the music performances. Experience has become a way to enhance the on-site atmosphere and extend users' stay time, but it has not truly formed brand assets that can be remembered for a long time.
At the same time, the core competitive element of music festivals, the "lineup", is also changing. In the past few years, as channels such as variety shows and short videos have continuously amplified the influence of artists, a number of popular musicians have quickly become the "standard answer" for music festivals. Some new organizers who directly copied the hit lineups of top-tier festivals further led to a high degree of overlap in lineup ratios and track selections.
Next, new forces began to "boost" music performances. Since the beginning of this year, "actors" in the traditional sense have frequently entered the offline music performance market of music festivals. Hou Minghao, Yue Yunpeng, Zhao Lusi... Music festivals are accelerating the acceptance of a group of "non-professional singers". Whether for the organizers or the artists themselves, this "roundabout way" has indeed delivered strong performance.
However, with the rapid expansion of the market, actors are leaving music festivals and directly entering the concert market. The same group of popular musicians flow between different cities and different projects. Even music festivals with clear positioning need to add stages of different music styles and enrich on-site experiences to meet the increasingly segmented needs of users.
When superstars are no longer sufficient to be the only attraction of music festivals, the industry begins to look for new answers: Can a music festival become an IP with independent cultural recognition?
In fact, the exploration of IP-based music performances has long been underway. However, the early exploration was not to build a new music festival brand from scratch, but to rely on existing music cultural assets to transform the accumulation of online labels and music brands into offline live events.
A representative case is Taihe Rye Music. In 2018, the original music label Rye Music announced its full return, and launched the first Rye Music Festival in the same year. Strictly speaking, the Rye Music Festival is not simply creating a new performance project, but using the music cultural influence accumulated by Rye Music for many years to bring back the music aesthetics, artist resources and user recognition formed by the label in the past to the offline scene.
As an original music label that once influenced a generation of music consumers, Rye Music itself has strong cultural symbol attributes, and the music festival is more like an extension of this brand asset in offline scenarios.
Another example is the Xiami Music Festival IP under Orca Entertainment. In February 2021, Xiami Music officially stopped its service. In September of the same year, Damai announced the establishment of the Xiami Music Entertainment Content Label, and set up an independent music performance division to promote the label-based operation of music performances.
During the National Day holiday, Xiami Music Entertainment officially debuted in the form of an indoor music festival. Against the backdrop that traditional music festival projects such as Strawberry Music Festival and Rye Music Festival were absent from the National Day schedule that year, Xiami Music Entertainment became one of the few large-scale music live events. What the Xiami Music Festival inherits is not just the performance form, but the music cultural temperament that Xiami App once accumulated.
Compared with emphasizing the scale of tens of thousands of attendees and top-tier lineups, Xiami puts more emphasis on independent music, music taste and community culture, which is exactly consistent with the brand recognition that Xiami had in users' minds in the past.
When an online music community has accumulated strong enough cultural identity, even if the product disappears, the aesthetic labels and user emotions behind it can still be reactivated through new offline scenarios.
However, the exploration at this stage relied more on the accumulation of music labels and vertical institutions themselves. Until the past two years, with the participation of internet platform companies, music performance IPs have entered a larger-scale commercial competition stage.
Platforms are ramping up investment,
Music IPs enter the stage of ecological operation
Their respective core capabilities determine the ways they cut into offline performances.
In addition to regular music content such as the TMEA Tencent Music Entertainment Awards that has been held for 7 years and the Wave Music Awards that has been held for 4 years, Tencent has also been creating more popular and comprehensive music performance IPs in the past two years. For example, JUMP PARK is more like an offline experiment of Tencent's content assets. The first JUMP PARK Music Carnival in 2025 was held at the apron of Qingdao Liuting International Airport, inviting artists such as Hua Chenyu, Li Yuchun, Da Zhangwei to participate, while linking with drama and variety IP content.
In 2026, JUMP PARK was upgraded to "Tencent Video Music Awards", further integrating content IPs such as TV dramas and variety shows, and expanding the on-site experience through interactive stages and themed scenarios. In addition to regular musicians such as Na Ying and Shan Yichun, the creators and chefs of TV dramas and variety shows such as *Yu Zhu*, *Mr. Magic Singer*, and *One Meal to Deify* also appeared at the event.
But there are also hidden worries. Fans of drama IPs come for the actors, fans of musicians come for the performances, and fans of anime IPs come for the characters. The three groups of people have different consumption motivations, so the on-site experience design needs to meet all three demands at the same time.
This also means that JUMP PARK needs to continuously bind the platform's hottest content at the moment. If there are no sufficiently appealing drama and variety IPs on the platform in a certain year, the differentiated advantage of the music festival will be weakened.
If Tencent Music's advantages come from the accumulation of the music industry chain, then ByteDance's entry method is more like a migration of internet product logic. The Soda Music Festival is a representative of this exploration.
In 2026, the Soda Music Festival first announced six cities: Changzhou, Beijing, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Chengdu and Guangzhou. The Chengdu session received more than 50,000 music fans in total over two days, gathering 18 groups of musicians including Will Pan and Chen Chusheng. Data shows that attendees under 30 years old accounted for more than 80% of the on-site audience.
ByteDance's strategy does not rely on a lineup of top-tier artists, but takes Douyin's native musicians and popular BGMs as the main lineup, and uses algorithm data to judge which cities and which musicians have real offline consumption conversion potential. The choice of Changzhou is not random: Changzhou has ranked first among the top 10 cities in the national large-scale music festival box office for two consecutive years, and the proportion of the population under 45 years old is nearly 55%.
Compared with Tencent and ByteDance, Damai's advantage does not lie in generating traffic, but in the long-accumulated performance ticketing infrastructure and on-site operation experience. In the past, Damai mostly played the role of a transaction service provider. However, as competition in the live entertainment market intensifies, the value of the ticketing entrance itself is decreasing. What has real long-term value is content IP that can create user demand.
From the music aesthetic that Xiami Music emphasized in the past to the space scene provided by Aranya, the two together form a consumption method different from traditional large-scale music festivals. Data shows that the Xiami Music Festival has accumulated 33 overseas artists, 30 brand partners, and 18 repeated brand cooperations in five years, with a repurchase rate of nearly 30%.
The differences in the paths of the three platforms reflect the extension direction of their respective core capabilities. Tencent's barrier lies in the depth of its content IP and content ecosystem; ByteDance's barrier lies in its algorithms and user data; Alibaba's barrier lies in the long-term accumulation of ticketing infrastructure and performance operation experience. After AI continuously reduces the production cost of online content, real crowd gathering, shared experience and emotional connection are becoming increasingly scarce entertainment resources.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Entertainment Unicorn" (ID: yuledujiaoshou), written by Akagi Bottle, and authorized for release by 36Kr.