How digitalization changed the Chinese music industry

Digitalization and its impact on the Chinese music industry

From 2014 to 2017 the Chinese music industry has shown vast growth. In fact the year 2017 saw its growth rate rise to a staggering 8.1 % a total business volume of about $17.3 billion. Though there has been a mixture of many factors contributing to the same one thing that cannot be ignored is digitalization of music there. Read on to know how digitalization changed the Chinese music industry.

Ever since digital music distribution started to foray into the market the impact started becoming clearly visible. It benefitted not only the artists but also those music lovers who were looking for ways to have a pleasurable experience listening to their favorite artists. The revenue coming from streaming platforms jumped to around 41% which is huge and difficult to beat.

Earlier the Chinese music industry was plagued by the impact of piracy and it was clear that this facet would never let the industry develop. However, with time music lovers have started understanding the importance of paying for music. This led to a decline of 20.5% in the number of free downloads happening. They have also become aware of piracy and intellectual property rights and hence they are willing to spend money to get access to the music they like.

As per the 2018 global music report, the income of the Chinese music industry rose by about 35.3%. This brought the industry in the top 10 business markets in the world. In order to dominate the digital music distribution market, Tencent has made many acquisitions and that has helped it too. Now it has joined with some major recording studios like Warner and Sony to provide a music experience that every lover would want to have.

Tencent is also operating services like Kuwo and Kugou and the purpose of both of them is to tap the potential music market present here. By being present on platforms like these the artists get a strategic benefit of being there at the right and deriving advantage out of it too.

If we consider it properly the Chinese music industry still has a lot of growing to do. Even though there have been major uplifts the revenue earned in 2017 is only 68% of the peak revenues this industry had earned in the year 1999. In spite of music being such an integral part of everyone’s life the industry still needs more support. However with steps in digital music distribution hopefully this gap would be filled completely soon.