Not only is it the world’s third-largest music subscription business, it might actually spoil Spotify and Apple Music’s plans for global expansion. Tencent invested big time last year to acquire a majority stake in $2.7bn-valued China Music Corp, with Kuwo and KuGou, two major music platforms, as part of their takeover.
Beyond the 200m monthly active users they can already brag about with their own QQ Music, Tencent counts more than 15m in paying music subscribers – with roughly over 77% in digital music market-share in China alone. What’s more, QQ Music consistently brings in profits (just like its parent company). Not even Spotify, Deezer, TIDAL, Pandora or basically any other single music streaming service in existence can say the same.
China is currently the 10th largest music market worldwide, with a population of 1.36bn (over 4x that of the USA). Individual spending per person, however, remains rather low, which is a concern.
