Yunnan, Douyin is king

Recently, the song "Da Ge Mei" from Yunnan has become popular on Douyin, and many people have integrated it into their creations. This is not the first time that Yunnan has become popular. Let's take a look at the popularity of Yunnan on Douyin~

"Big rivers and big seas, big rivers and big seas, you're still turning sideways. If you don't know how to sing, learn how to sing. Just do what my brother does."

Recently, the Yunnan local song "Da Ge Mei" has quietly swept the information flow of some Douyin users. Due to its catchy and easy-to-imitate characteristics, many short video creators, including plot, dance and live-action accounts, have rushed to imitate it. The total number of views on Douyin for topics named "Da Ge" or "Yunnan Da Ge" has exceeded 3 billion.

Douyin has never lacked new memes or local internet celebrities.

In the past year, Douyin, which owns the largest content traffic pool on the Chinese Internet, has not only made internet celebrity cities such as Tianshui, Harbin, and Zibo popular, but also has seen the emergence of local internet celebrities singing "Speaking Jincheng Words to Jincheng People" and "Gansu is not Small to Create Myths."

To paraphrase Andy Warhol’s famous quote from the pre-internet era, the story can be summed up as “Everywhere is famous for 15 minutes.”

However, the region that stands out the most in this story is probably Yunnan. Long before the Yunnan song became popular, more than one meme originated from Yunnan became popular on Douyin. Yunnan is so densely populated with memes, just like its position in the domestic flower market. Many netizens even jokingly call Douyin "Yunnan Satellite TV", which means to praise the dominance of Yunnan culture on Douyin.

Why is Yunnan so famous for producing Tik Tok memes?

1. Promote songs, the new generation of Douyin hits‍

There has never been a shortage of extraordinary people in Yunnan.

Recently, a song called "Da Ge Mei" has become popular in short videos, which is comparable to "Subject 3". Videos with this song as the background music are often "open-air disco scenes", just as the lyrics say: "Brothers and sisters, young and old, dance together happily."

The history of "Da Ge Mei" is not long. The original author "Lin Shuhao" sang this song at a local evening party in 2012. According to the Kunming Da Ge Team, this song was created in 2000 and is based on the folk dance tune of Lincang. The form may be similar to Wang Luobin's collection and secondary creation of Xinjiang folk songs.

The song has been popular on Douyin for several times due to its local Yunnan style, catchy lyrics and easy-to-imitate movements. However, it was previously limited to the circle of creators in Yunnan, and was repeatedly sung by local Yunnan internet celebrities with low fan bases such as "Xueshan Lange" and "Lincang Xiongge".

Until March this year, more people began to know about the existence of "Da Ge" because a rustic internet celebrity "Yibiao" often used "Da Ge Mei" as BGM, and video creators such as "Lincang Xiong Ge" began to gain more traffic. The algorithm keenly captured the length of time users stayed on this song and pushed it to a larger circle, allowing it to gain wider exposure. The divine song gradually showed signs of becoming popular.

Of course, what made the singing girl even more popular was the support of short video content.

On the one hand, the blessing comes from "making things happen" and "playing with memes". Netizens have linked the Yunnan song promotion with carrying things on shoulders, creating a popular meme that when you hear the song, you will be "forced to be controlled for 30 seconds" - that is, when you hear the song, you will involuntarily carry things around you and sway to the rhythm. With the birth of replicable source content, short videos began to show their magic of one, two, two, three, and three, and everything. Popularity was created again.

Some more creative ones combined the "singing girl" with the social phobia challenge that was once associated with the third subject. They carried speakers in public, hummed and swayed, and asked passers-by in the video to activate passive acceleration, so that the audience behind the screen needed courage to even finish watching. This gave the song promotion the same content tone as the third subject. Popularity has become something that can be calculated in cycles.

The simple melody of "Da Ge Mei" also provides space for secondary creation. For example, plot creators such as "Da Wei Lao San" adapted the lines of Da Ge Mei in the form of multiple disciplines, extending more replicable templates for Da Ge Mei's content creation. Various secondary creations have made Da Ge even more popular, creating a new generation of Douyin divine songs.

Of course, another reason why the singing girl can be copied crazily is the tolerance of the creators themselves.

The author Lin Shuhao once publicly stated that he would not pursue copyright infringement by cover singers, and also encouraged users to create secondary works. After the song became popular, a large number of media companies wanted to buy out the copyright of the song, but Lin Shuhao refused.

2. From folk songs to popular songs, Yunnan is strong

As a local cultural feature of Yunnan, sung songs are only a representative form of Yunnan's song and dance culture. With the rise of sung songs, netizens have taken the initiative to dig out motorcycle dance, sung dance, peacock dance and so on from the vast number of online videos.

In fact, Yunnan’s dominance over popular Internet content may have begun even earlier than the birth of short video apps.

In the popular online drama "Report to the Boss" ten years ago, the creators had already set their sights on the mysterious Yunnan folk songs. They used parody and secondary creation to bring Yunnan folk songs such as "Old Driver, Take Me with You" and "Fake Cigarettes, Fake Alcohol, Fake Friends" to the first generation of Internet natives, completing the first wave of popularization of Yunnan culture on the Internet.

Time flies. In the process of China's gradual transition from the PC Internet to the mobile Internet era, Yunnan was briefly absent. The reason is simple. When short videos were first born, they were aimed at the most simple desires of human beings. On Kuaishou, it was the strange rural landscape created by the "cruel stories of the lower class"; on Douyin, it was the so-called three goddesses who led the whole people to instinctively flock to beauty.

People's attention is limited, and Yunnan cannot break through the siege in every season.

However, curiosity and desire cannot escape people's instinct to like the new and dislike the old. In the development of short video platforms, new users continue to increase, and user needs are gradually diversified. Whether it is the creators' spontaneous escape from involution or the algorithmic logic of the platform, it actually contributes to the birth of a steady stream of "new" content. In the past few years, from Zhang Tongxue to Dong Yuhui, the emergence of new top streamers is due to this underlying logic.

At the same time, regional influencers emerged. When the supply of homogeneous content was close to saturation, vertical influencers targeting specific groups of people from different regions ushered in their own destiny.

From the northeast corner to the southwest corner of the map, the unique culture of any place is enough to form differentiated content and create a medium-sized Internet celebrity with hundreds of thousands of fans. For example, "The land and water nurture the people" and Jincheng, "Gansu is not big to create myths" and Gansu, etc.

Yunnan has become one of the most eye-catching new regionalized content trends.

In the past few years alone, a Lisu boy used the song "I am from Yunnan" to bring Yunnan to the first wave of traffic peak, and also led to the trend of hometown registration sweeping the entire Chinese community. Then, Yunnan Quanmei used the song "Dinosaur Carrying Wolf" to create one of the biggest hot memes last year. This year, song promotion has risen strongly again, and Yunnan Rap Reading the Name of the Dish was also a small hit.

Obviously, compared with the relatively single popular content output of Internet celebrities in other places, Yunnan has richer content genes and strong cultural vitality, enough to make other provinces sincerely praise: "Why is Yunnan so strong every season?"

A more interesting metaphor is to compare the people of Yunnan to the Smurfs: because they live in the mountains, are good at singing and dancing, and love to eat mushrooms.

3. Yunnan, the content gene of a borderland

On Douyin, some content comes with its own traffic code. The core of it is "strangeness", the farther away from the lives of ordinary people, the fresher the better. As a result, over the past few years, some content, even if not so high-quality, can still easily gain traffic on Douyin, such as "Life of the Rich Second Generation" and "Foreigners' Perspectives".

The reason why Yunnan has become so popular again and again is first of all the attraction brought by its “alienation”.

Compared to what the main users of Douyin can access on a daily basis, everything in Yunnan, as a borderland, seems strange or fresh. On the one hand, the local ethnic minority population is about 15 million, accounting for one-third of the local total population. The unique dances and songs of ethnic minorities create the first auditory attraction.

But being “strange” alone is not enough. Fresh things can attract users’ attention and create one or two “explosive” videos, but to create a popular moment on a short video platform, the most important thing is to cause followers and imitations, that is, to constantly recreate the “original content”.

Yunnan culture is vigorous and unique, but more importantly, it is not an elite culture but an amateur culture that is easy to imitate.

In the past few years, amateur culture has been in vogue while elite culture has retreated. Cultural tourism promotional videos produced by cameras and guns have been defeated by casual shots taken by ordinary people with their mobile phones. Carefully designed posters and trailers have been defeated by short video movie marketing. Movies that have been produced with a lot of money are ultimately less attractive than the three-minute clips of handsome men and beautiful women.

The popular content produced in Yunnan obviously also conforms to this basic logic.

It is rough but full of vitality, and can be accepted by the widest range of users; at the same time, it is easy to imitate. "I am from Yunnan" can be easily replaced by "I am from Hubei" or even "I am from Hong Kong" and "I am from Malaysia"; anyone with ordinary voice conditions can hum a few lines of "How do you dance, brother?" and shake out simple dance steps, and the brainlessness and abstractness of "Dinosaurs Fighting Wolves" can naturally be applied to any video.

Short videos have their own evaluation criteria for the quality of content. Yunnan, located in a remote area, happens to meet these criteria in every aspect.

People's preferences change, but sometimes they remain unchanged. From folk songs to hit songs, Yunnan, with its 4,000-kilometer-long border and diverse cultural reserves, has always had outstanding content creation capabilities.

I believe that Yunnan will still have the opportunity to shine next season.

Author: Chen Shoucheng WeChat public account: Hedgehog Commune