Music Ally

It might be engaged in a public licensing spat with the music industry in the UK, but in China Google is the good guy, following its launch of a free and fully licensed music downloads service.

It’s launched with 350,000 songs from artists on all four major labels, with plans to expand the catalogue to over 1.1 million this year. Google is sharing advertising revenues from the service with the labels, and working with Chinese music site Top100.cn to run it.

Google hopes to gain ground on local search rival Baidu, while the labels hope it’ll attract Chinese consumers away from illegal download sites.

IFPI boss John Kennedy has already hailed the move, describing it as “fantastic news” and “the perfect marriage between first-class technology and creative talent to produce a great product”.

There are no plans at present to expand the service beyond China.

Chinese hackers have cracked the codes used for iTunes Store vouchers using key-generators, and as a result are selling $200 voucher codes for as little as $2.60 online. That’s according to a report on the blog of Chinese music industry consultancy Outdustry.

It points out that thousands of these hacked vouchers are for sale on Chinese online shopping site Taobao, where users are paying the hackers to generate codes for them to sell.

Apparently six months ago, a $200 card went for around 320 RMB (roughly $47), but the price has since plummeted to around 18 RMB ($2.60) as more sellers pile in. “But we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly,” one tells Outdustry.

As Apple reportedly prepares to launch its iPhone in China, the news is sure to cause concern within the company – especially if these hacked voucher codes start being sold in the West too.

Chinese digital music firm A8 has released its interim figures and two remarkable facts stand out. Firstly the company is reporting a tripling in revenues to RMB 329m (GBP £26m) and profits of RMB 136m (£11m). To put that in context A8’s total revenue is roughly equivalent to the entire digital music market in France (EUR 36m) The income comes primarily from mobile; and here’s the other startling fact: (more…)

Internet users in China are reportedly having problems accessing the US iTunes Store, with the problem allegedly due to the Chinese government’s unhappiness with the release of a recent Songs For Tibet compilation on Apple’s digital store. The group behind it, The Art of (more…)

We love the name of Beijing firm R2G’s new music subscription service: it’s called Wawawa and launched last Friday, with more than a million tracks from indie digital distributor IODA. The service costs 20 yuan a month (around $2.93) on an eMusic-style model where subscribers get up to 88 downloads a month, while also being able to stream their purchases over the Web (an important feature in China, where internet cafes are popular). (more…)

More news from China – a market coveted and feared by music firms in equal measure for its size and piracy – with Google apparently about to launch an MP3 search engine to compete with local search site Baidu. (more…)

More bad news for Chinese search engine Baidu, which has been facing legal action over its `deep linking’ to pirated music for some time now. A coalition of music industry firms including labels and publishers has called for a boycott of the site by advertisers and other corporations. The statement has been signed by UMG, Sony BMG, and Warner Music, as well as Universal Music Publishing, Warner-Chappell Music, EMI Music Publishing and various local companies – in total, 80% of the Chinese music industry.

Thinking of launching a streaming mobile music service in China? You better brush up on your administration skills then: new rules for webcasting in the country mean you’ll have to get permits from two separate Chinese government agencies before you can begin. Meanwhile, ownership and control of webcasting operations have (more…)