The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2017
NetEase Cloud Music fills Hangzhou Metro with user reviews, tops App Store chart
In March 2017, NetEase printed top user reviews on Hangzhou Metro, going viral and topping App Store music chart.
NetEase Cloud Music (网易云音乐)
What it had to solve
NetEase Cloud Music wanted to increase brand awareness and market share; music apps faced intense homogeneous competition, UGC music reviews were its core asset differentiating it from rivals, and the metro was the city's highest-foot-traffic, enclosed space where emotions spread easily.
How it works
On March 20, 2017, NetEase Cloud Music's 'Music Review Special Train: See the Power of Music' (乐评专列：看见音乐的力量) launched in Hangzhou in cooperation with Hangzhou MTR (杭港地铁): 85 user music reviews selected from more than 400 million comments were printed across an entire train car set on Metro Line 1 and at Jiangling Road Station (江陵路站). The inspiration came from Vice President Li Yin (李茵)—she browsed music reviews for more than an hour and was moved, so she decided to put these real emotions into the metro.
In execution, the team used data scoring plus manual one-by-one reading to select 85 lines from the more than 5,000 most-liked music reviews that were most likely to resonate with metro commuters, with the theme landing on 'loneliness' (孤独): the shared experience of listening to music and riding the metro. The train ran from March 20 to April 16, and for nearly one month 'NetEase Red' (网易红) remained.
The results exceeded expectations: overnight it became a nationwide hot topic, more than 2,000 media outlets reported it, Baidu Index rose 80% year on year, WeChat Index rose 261-fold to 13 million, and it reached Weibo hot search; the App Store music chart rose from No. 3 to No. 1, and the free overall chart rose from around No. 30 to No. 9. The project won the 2017 Roifestival (金投赏) Grand Prix.
Why it lands
- Music reviews are NetEase Cloud Music's unique UGC asset, which other platforms cannot copy—using real user content as advertising is inherently credible and inherently resonant.
- The medium was chosen accurately: the metro has high foot traffic, enclosed space, concentrated attention, and fast emotional contagion, so content and scene amplify each other.
- Low cost: no need to shoot films or hire celebrities; 85 user-written lines are all the material, and dissemination is completed spontaneously by passengers and netizens.
- Offline events feed back online: downloads and exposure from the viral spread are directly reflected in App Store rankings, combining brand and performance.
What it did
Went viral overnight: more than 2,000 media outlets reported it, Baidu Index rose 80% year on year, WeChat Index rose 261-fold to 13 million, and it became a Weibo hot search; the App Store music chart rose from No. 3 to No. 1, the free overall chart rose to No. 9, and it won the 2017 Roifestival (金投赏) Grand Prix.
What you can take
UGC can become ads: good product, good UGC, then place in enclosed scenes; passengers spread it online, near-zero cost.
Since then
After the music review special train, 'See the Power of Music' (看见音乐的力量) became a long-term content asset for NetEase Cloud Music, and in 2017 it also successively conducted UGC scene marketing such as the Music Special Plane (音乐专机). Post-event reviews by media such as Digitaling (数英) pointed out that the key to cases like this is not methodology but the product itself—without quality UGC, the same placement would not work.
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