Tencent Music: Let the Online Music Grow in a Sustainably Prosperous Way
Services which enable streaming and downloading music have been available for a long time in most parts of the world. In mainland China, Internet users’ demands for good music have been increasing and Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME), the largest digital music and social company in mainland China, has made great efforts to provide consumer-oriented services and innovations to grow in this market. The group is looking to make fuller use of the possibilities of today’s technology to give users a whole new experience.
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Parent company Tencent is a leading provider of Internet value added services in China, providing social platforms, such as the ubiquitous QQ (QQ Instant Messenger) and Weixin/WeChat, as well as the digital content services under the “Connection” Strategy. TME was created in 2016 to mainly manage the company’s three online streaming sites, QQ Music, Kugou, and Kuwo, amongst which, QQ Music is now the largest online streaming site in mainland China. Together, these three are the most popular music streaming services in the mainland, with around 700 million active monthly users, according to TME Vice President Dennis Hau. In addition, Hau says, TME’s WeSing online karaoke app has a total of 460 million registered users.
The business model
“Artists have a hard time selling physical albums in the shops these days,” Hau explains. “People are changing the way they get their music, and they are becoming used to getting songs from the cloud.”
TME was the first music streaming business to introduce the subscription model to the mainland music market, Hau notes. “Our users are still listening to music online for free, and for some music we charge them for downloads to support the musician’s sustainable development. Though with many exclusively authorized songs, we have been licensing music to other businesses and music service platforms like Alibaba’s Xiami. We are devoted to grow the prosperous online music market, to provide more good music to Internet users, and at the same time reward the musicians for the sustainable development of the whole industry.“
This makes TME the main music service provider and content distributor in the mainland. “We are trying to create an ecosystem. For example, via QQ Music a user can listen to music, watch a music video, and then use our WeSing online karaoke app to sing and then share it with their friends,” Hau says.
One way to enable this ecosystem grow in a healthy and sustainable way, is to offer devoted fans the chance to buy digital albums, by their favorite artist, before the songs are available to the public. QQ Music invents the creation of digital albums, which has been a popular online music pattern in mainland China for years. Examples of recordings TME has published in this way, Hau cites the latest Taylor Swift album, and the new album by Taiwanese artist, Jay Chou. The latter sold a record-breaking one million albums in 36 hours, earning the musician 20 million yuan.