On the evening of December 31st, which New Year's Eve gala did you choose as your companion to ring in the new year? Among them, Bilibili (hereinafter referred to as "B站") can be described as a unique spectacle. This year, B站 maintained its distinctive style for the gala, using orchestral music as a foundation and focusing on creative planning around film, anime, and gaming IPs. By integrating changes in the annual pop culture market, it presented IP content currently beloved by young people while also reflecting the emotional shifts of the younger generation. The gala featured a series of classic IPs such as "Journey to the West," "Lotus Lantern," "Magic Phone," "The X-Family," and "Chinese Paladin," and invited powerful singers from home and abroad including Liu Huan, Zhou Shen, Shan Yichun, Zhang Shaohan, "Fruit Sister" Katy Perry, and "Squat Sister" Carly Rae Jepsen. It merged collective symbolic content from multiple generations like the 80s, 90s, and 00s, leading the audience to experience the purest joy through a visual concert. It is understood that the peak viewership popularity for the B站 gala livestream on its platform reached 350 million, with over 250,000 overseas users watching from 200 countries and regions globally, and real-time danmu interactions exceeding 10 million. This indicates that not only domestic audiences but also many young people overseas anticipate this gala. Since its inaugural broadcast in 2019, which became a phenomenal, critically-acclaimed event, B站 has now hosted the New Year's Eve gala for seven consecutive years. The B站 New Year's Eve Gala has become an important content choice for global youth at the turn of the year. Within 24 hours of the gala's broadcast, user-generated videos related to the event accumulated over 100 million plays. Beyond the gala content itself, B站 continued this year to build its offline "New Year's Cheers Night" event, linking live scenes in 10 cities in real-time via screens and broadcasting the midnight fireworks show, further enhancing the online-to-offline interactive experience. Data shows that this year's B站 Cheers Night event attracted a foot traffic of 1.6 million people. At the New Year, young groups watch the B站 gala online and gather offline at the Cheers Night to celebrate together. Participating in B站's New Year's activities has already become an important ritual for the younger generation to bid farewell to the past and welcome the new year.
IP Revivals + Creative Arrangements: B站's New Year's Eve Gala Evokes Collective Resonance Through Cultural Symbols. In recent years, the content style of B站's New Year's Eve Gala has become increasingly stable. The programs do not primarily feature celebrity traffic or song-and-dance performances but instead creatively arrange cultural IPs with collective memories and universal recognition from bygone years, awakening the happiest and most innocent memories deep within audiences of all ages. The music show "The Badass with a Soundtrack," performed by renowned music producer Zhao Zhao, folk musician Wu Tong, and others accompanied by a symphony orchestra, took the form of an East-West musical "battle." It seamlessly integrated and connected classic film and TV music from both East and West, including themes from "God of Gamblers," "A Chinese Odyssey," "Empresses in the Palace," "The Godfather," "Star Wars," and "Kill Bill," offering the audience an auditory feast. Danmu comments flooded the screen with praises like, "Great work deserves a reward." When Lo Ka-ying, the actor who played Tang Seng in the film "A Chinese Odyssey," appeared on stage in Buddhist robes singing "Only You," the danmu once again exploded with comments like, "Master, please stop chanting." The song performance "Be Your Own Hero" wove together the theme songs of two representative works from the 2025 domestic animation market, "Little Monster of Langlang Mountain" and "A Record of a Mortal’s Journey to Immortality." As the songs were performed, classic Chinese animation characters like Nezha, the little pig demon, and Han Li were presented in silhouette form. This program received recognition from the authoritative media outlet People's Daily on the very night it aired. This type of creative program that deconstructs and fuses classic cultural symbols has always been one of the core contents of B站.
Performances by Katy Perry, Zhang Shaohan, TANK, and Others Singing Classic Songs Evoke Nostalgia. That night, performances by singers from home and abroad such as "Fruit Sister" Katy Perry, Zhang Shaohan, TANK, and Jiro Wang also received positive feedback from users. Beyond conventional song performances, B站 incorporated personalized stage design to resonate with the audience through youthful nostalgia. Katy Perry performed for the first time on a domestic New Year's Eve gala. At the pivotal moment of the New Year, she sang her classic song "Firework," sending blessings to the Chinese audience as conveyed in the lyrics, "Baby, you're a firework, come on, show 'em what you're worth." Singers Zhang Shaohan and TANK delivered their representative songs, from "Aurora" and "Lost Beauty" to "If I Become a Memory" and "Tears of a Thousand Years," swiftly transporting the audience back to the golden age of Cantopop and Mandopop. The program "Who Moved the Hands of My Counter-Clock?" pushed this nostalgic sentiment to the extreme. With a theme of time flowing backward, it presented classic film and TV works from the 90s like "The X-Family," "Magic Phone," and "Lotus Lantern." After the program aired, it immediately awakened the youthful memories of a large number of viewers, with danmu comments like, "If time could flow backward, I'd be back in elementary school." Data indicated that during Katy Perry's performance segment, the popularity of the B站 livestream room reached a new peak.
Young Inheritors Perform "Three Times Beating the White Bone Demon," High-Aesthetic Stage Showcases Eastern Charm. Beyond classic IPs and nostalgic triggers, the B站 New Year's Eve Gala also continued its tradition from previous years by creating programs with both high acclaim and high aesthetic value, based on the B站 community ecosystem. Following representative, highly-praised cultural programs like "The Journey of a Legendary Landscape Painting" and "A Dream of Red Mansions," this year's B站 gala featured the opera program "Three Times Beating the White Bone Demon." It integrated multiple traditional opera genres such as Peking opera, Wu opera, Qinqiang, and Guiju opera to recreate the classic episode from the literary masterpiece "Journey to the West." The performance incorporated many traditional skills of Chinese opera culture, such as triple costume changes, face-changing (bian lian), and elaborate staff techniques, depicting the White Bone Demon's three classic transformations into a village girl, an old woman, and an old man. It is noteworthy that most of the performers in this opera program were young inheritors of intangible cultural heritage, with four actors being from the post-00s generation. Traditional culture is being seen and loved by more young people, and these young inheritors are opening up more possibilities for various traditional art forms. "Journey to the West" has consistently been popular content in B站's film/TV and knowledge zones. The 86 version of "Journey to the West" has accumulated over 340 million plays on B站, and the user-generated videos by B站 UP host "Nanke Youran" related to "Journey to the West" have garnered over 20 million plays on the platform. Also receiving acclaim was the dance drama "The Peony Pavilion." B站 brought the excerpt "Wandering in the Garden" to the gala stage, reinterpreting the literary masterpiece through artistic dance and showcasing the ultimate in Eastern classical aesthetics. As the most active video community for young people in China, B站 consistently designs its New Year's Eve gala content based on the interests, preferences, and content demands of the youth. It merges diverse IP niche cultures with mainstream aesthetics, allowing more viewers to gain emotional resonance and spiritual solace on New Year's Eve. Today, among the variety of New Year's Eve galas, the B站 New Year's Eve Gala has become a significant part of young viewers' New Year memories. High-quality content is not only remembered by the audience but also provides them with strength as they charge into the new year.
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