Tag: China
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Social app Musical.ly to shut down after merger with TikTok

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Social music app Musical.ly is being shut down by its owner Beijing Bytedance Technology Co, which plans to merge the app’s community with one of its other apps, TikTok.

Bytedance bought Musical.ly for more than $800m in November 2017, after the latter app had grown to more than 100 million users – mostly in the west. However, TikTok has an even bigger community of 500 million monthly active users in Asia.

[Just so it’s clear: Musical.ly the app has nothing to do with Music Ally the music-industry research company – we’re the latter, and have been operating as Music Ally since 2002.]

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Facebook opens China ‘innovation hub’ despite being blocked

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“There are three reasons I decided to learn Chinese,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a Chinese audience (in Mandarin) back in October 2014.

“The first, my wife is Chinese. Her grandmother can only speak Chinese. When I told her in Chinese I was going to marry Priscilla, she was very shocked. Then I want to study Chinese culture. The third: Chinese is hard and I like a challenge.”

Fourth, of course: the hope that Facebook could one day expand its business to China, even if the country’s government seemed steadfast at the time about blocking access to the western world’s biggest social network.

Fast forward to 2018, and that’s still the case. Facebook, however, is finding a way to explore China a bit more. Reuters reports that the company has set up a new subsidiary there.

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Chinese secondary-ticketing firm Moretickets raises $60m

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In the west, secondary-ticketing platforms are increasingly controversial in terms of their role within the music industry. In China, though, one of the most popular sites has just raised a significant funding round. 

Moretickets’ Series C round was worth $60m, led by investment firm TPG Growth – last covered here in January when it bought a 75% stake in music’n’media firm Trace, and before that when its parent company led Spotify’s $1bn debt-funding round in 2017.

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100m smart speakers expected to be in use by end of 2018

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Research firm Canalys has published the latest report predicting the growth of the smart-speakers market, and there’s a big, round number attached to it. “Canalys expects the smart speaker installed base will approach the 100-million barrier by the end of this year, making it almost 2.5 times bigger than at the end of 2017,” claimed the company.

Its analysis also provides some new forecasts for market shares of the big western tech players in this market. Canalys reckons that Amazon Echo devices will account for more than 50% of the install base in 2018, compared to 30% for Google Home devices and 4% for Apple’s HomePod – or 50m, 30m and 4m units respectively.

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Tencent Music Entertainment tipped to file for IPO this week

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Spotify’s direct public offering is still fresh in the memory, but another much anticipated music-streaming public offering – this time an IPO rather than a DPO – may be imminent.

Local media reports suggest that Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) may file for its IPO in the US as early as this Friday. The valuation (or at least the hoped-for valuation) is pegged at between $29bn and $31bn, which would put TME at Spotify scale from day one, based on the latter’s current stock price.

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NetEase hails success of western artists on its service

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We’ve heard at several conferences recently that Chinese streaming service NetEase Cloud Music might be a happier hunting ground for western artists than rival services operated by Tencent Music.

Now NetEase is talking about some of the success stories to reinforce that view. More than 30% of activity on its service – including streams but also comments, playlisting and favouriting by users – involves international music.

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Sony targets ‘viable subscription businesses’ in China and India

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Sony Music boss Rob Stringer has been talking about the major label’s hopes for emerging markets, including its expectations that there will be healthy paid-music ecosystems rather than simply ad-supported services.

“We are fully focused on developing viable subscription businesses in emerging markets such as China and India, where previously only very limited physical or digital download business existed,” Stringer told Sony Corp investors this week, according to MBW.

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China’s music potential: ‘We are finally getting there!’

by Chiara Michieletto

2017 was a big year for the music industry in China: according to the IFPI, last year it was one of the world’s 10 biggest recorded-music markets for the first time.

Excitement around the growth of the music-streaming services run by tech companies like Tencent and NetEase is palpable within the western industry, but a day’s worth of talks and panels at last week’s The Great Escape conference curated by Complete Music Update (CMU) provided more context for that enthusiasm.

The day started with the IFPI’s regional director for Asia, Ang Kwee Tiang (or KT Ang, as he’s often known), providing an excellent overview of what’s been happening in China.

He explained that in 2017, recorded-music revenues in China grew by 35.3% to $292.3m, and that within that, streaming revenues grew by 26.5% to $204.5m.

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Beggars Group China strategy: ‘We have a real issue with exclusivity’

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“China was my hobby for the best part of 10 years: something which the company allowed me to run as a hobby on the side as long as I wasn’t spending too much money. It was five years before we made any money whatsoever, and 10 years until we felt we had a business…”

Simon Wheeler, director of digital at independent music company Beggars Group, first went to China in 2006 on a trade mission organised by trade group AIM and government body UKTI. The dominant form of digital-music consumption was piracy, but his curiosity was piqued.

“At that time, there was no pressure from the Chinese government in the market for people to behave properly. Effectively it was the Wild West,” he says, of a time when local music services were essentially unlicensed.

“We were going in and doing meetings with people saying ‘How about a licence?’ and they’d just be smiling at you. ‘Why would we want to do a licence? We’ve got your music already…’” he remembers.

“But it was a good learning experience to go and do that. If nothing else, we got to build relationships with all the different players, even though we weren’t able to do business back in those days.”

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Merlin signs deals with NetEase, Tencent and Alibaba in China

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Indie licensing agency Merlin has announced agreements with the three biggest music-streaming service owners in China: Tencent, NetEase and Alibaba.

The deals will see the catalogue represented by Merlin – music from more than 20,000 independent labels and distributors – made available on Chinese streaming services including NetEase Cloud Music, Xiami, QQ Music, Kugou and Kuwo.

The important point here is that these deals are non-exclusive. They buck the existing trend for western music companies to sign a single, exclusive deal with one of these companies. For example Universal Music’s Tencent partnership in May 2017, or Cooking Vinyl’s Alibaba deal in August.

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UMG’s Jonathan Dworkin: ‘Despacito is more than just a hit’ (#SlushMusic)

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As SVP of digital strategy and business development at Universal Music Group, Jonathan Dworkin is playing a significant role in how the biggest major label wants to steer the digital music world in the years to come.

His speech at the Slush Music conference in Helsinki this morning focused on ‘the globalisation of the music business’ at the end of a year that has seen UMG benefit from the biggest-ever breakout hit from Latin America: ‘Despacito’.

“I’m not actually going to talk about the music business. I’m going to talk about the history of the shipping container,” he said. “You think I’m kidding?” He wasn’t.

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Paid online-music market tipped to grow 59% in China

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The market for ‘paid online music’ in China is expected to grow by 59% this year to $455m according to research firm iResearch, whose prediction is quoted prominently in the Financial Times’ latest piece on China.

It focuses on the evolving dynamics of the Chinese streaming market, where the exclusive licensing deals signed by Tencent with global labels are being challenged by regulator the National Copyright Administration.