China Streaming Services Outpacing Spotify
Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and NetEase Cloud Music (NCM) saw significant growth in paying online music users in Q1 2022.
- Music Business Worldwide
Some interesting news out of China: Both of the region’s biggest music streaming providers, Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) and NetEase Cloud Music (NCM) saw significant growth in paying online music users in the first three months of 2022.
That’s ‘paying online music users’ rather than ‘subscribers’ because this specifically-worded metric – particularly relevant to TME – is adopted by both companies in their financials.
- TME – owner of QQ Music, Kugou Music, and Kuwo Music – offers music streaming subscriptions in addition to paid-for downloads;
- NCM, meanwhile, offers two tiers of paid streaming subscription: (i) A standard tier at 8 RMB (approx USD $1.26) per month, which has limited offline ‘downloads’; and (ii) A ‘Vinyl VIP’ tier, at RMB 18 ($2.84) per month. This actually has nothing to do with vinyl (!) but offers ‘vinyl-quality’ streaming music and unlimited offline ‘downloads’.
According to newly-issued financial results analyzed by MBW, Tencent Music added 4.0 million paying music users quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2022, and added 19.3 million in comparison to the prior-year quarter.
Where these figures become particularly intriguing is when we compare them to Spotify‘s performance in the same time period (Q1 2022).
Spotify, remember, owns a minority stake in TME, and TME – in conjunction with Tencent Holdings – owns a minority stake in Spotify.
Spotify also doesn’t operate as a service in China.
