“Over the past few years, China’s music industry has seemed to vacillate between cautious optimism and a modicum of despair,” writes Mathew Daniel, president, international of music distribution service R2G, in his latest blog post. It’s a good primer on the current state of the market in China, covering the growth of local services like QQ Music, Kuwo and Kugou, aidu Music, Xiami and others. Daniel is blunt about some of the challenges too:
“The streaming and download figures displayed on numerous services, which are all unverified, include fake numbers and are influenced by close cooperation with selected labels,” he writes. “In some cases, it’s the music service pushing select artists who they believe could help drive more traffic.” He adds that free is the dominant model for now, as services try to “quickly draw in more consumers and with the least amount of resistance” – which in turn means that “there is little incentive for companies to either improve their services or increase their catalogue size, as these would add on to costs but bring in only marginal returns of increased revenue”. Read the post linked to below for the full picture.
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