NetEase, Japan’s Studio Ghibli team up to stream music from some of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime films
- The Japanese film studio’s music catalogue will be available online in China via NetEase Cloud Music
- The online streaming service has the biggest community for Japanese music fans in China
NetEase Cloud Music, the Nasdaq-traded company’s on-demand streaming service, will make the catalogue – including albums and soundtracks from films such as My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea – available to subscribers in the world’s second largest economy, according to a NetEase announcement on Friday.
“The cooperation with Studio Ghibli further strengthens NetEase Cloud Music’s competitive edge as a go-to platform for high-quality international music,” the company said in a statement. It declined to provide further details about the deal with the Tokyo-based animation film studio.
The stakes are high for both NetEase and Tencent in the country’s growing music streaming market, which research portal Statista has projected to be worth US$1.2 billion by 2024 from an estimated US$917 million this year.
Launched in 2013, NetEase Cloud Music has grown to become the biggest community for Japanese music fans in China, the company said in a separate statement. This platform, which offers 30 million tracks to more than 800 million users, has built up a robust Japanese library that includes content from the fields of J-pop and classical music, as well as anime, video games and manga, comprising comics and graphic novels.