Japanese music-streaming service Line Music has just celebrated its fourth anniversary, and it’s promising some significant new features over the coming months.
The service, run by social-media firm Line, now has 11 million monthly active users, with more than 32 million downloads of its app so far.
Anyway, those new features include the introduction of a freemium tier, with a working title of ‘One Play’, which will launch at some point in 2019. It will offer on-demand access to Line Music’s 54m-song catalogue to non-paying users for the first time, rather than restricting them to 30-second clips. There is a restriction still: once played, a song will only be available again “after a certain period of time”.
Line Music will also add music videos this summer, with plans for improvements to the app’s AI-powered recommendations too. All this is part of Line Music’s ambitions to help drive more growth for music-streaming in Japan.
According to the IFPI, revenues from streaming in Japan grew by 32.6% to $356.5m in 2018, but the country fell behind China for the first time in terms of streaming revenues, being the fifth largest market by that metric.
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