Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) has a full set of joint-venture labels with the three global majors, having announced one with Warner Music Group yesterday. It’s part of the two companies’ extended licensing deal, and follows similar JV announcements with Sony Music (in 2018) and Universal Music (in 2020).
Meanwhile, TME published its latest financial results overnight, revealing that it ended 2020 with 56 million ‘online music paying users’ – a metric that includes streaming subscribers across its three services in China, but also people buying digital music a la carte. That 56m figure was up 40.4% year-on-year, with 4.3 million net new payers having been added in the final quarter of 2020.
TME’s online music revenues grew by 29% to RMB 2.76bn (around $423m) in the final quarter of 2020, including $242m of streaming subscriptions revenue (up by 41.9%).
Meanwhile, TME’s monthly active users for online music actually fell year-on-year by 3.4% – although with 622 million of them, its footprint remains enormous.
Also noteworthy: the number of independent musicians uploading directly to TME’s services via its Tencent Musician Platform more than doubled year-on-year, with the company noting that 40% of them are women “compared with industry average of around 20% in China”.
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