Internet giants in China are stirring up the global music market.

When Lil Nas X recorded the single "OldTown Road" in a small studio, he never thought that more than 70 million people would use this song to record short videos on TikTok. It is even more unexpected that such a popular way will make him occupy the top position of Billboard Hot 100 for 19 consecutive weeks.
Maybe even TikTok didn’t expect that not only in China, but also in European and American markets, musicians began to use TikTok to promote their songs, and record companies paid more and more attention to this platform. At the same time, as the most popular social platform, TikTok frequently appeared on the front pages of major overseas media, became the number one competitor of overseas Internet giants, and was also targeted by the US Securities and Futures Commission.

Netease: machine emperor blessing, cast a dark horse in the African music market
Last month, Netease released its financial report for the third quarter, and the revenue of Netease Cloud Music reached a new high. At the same time, BoomPlay, a music streaming service owned by Netease, reached a copyright licensing cooperation with Sony Music. Previously, it reached copyright licensing cooperation with Universal Music and Warner Music Group in November 2018 and March 2019 respectively.
What’s the origin of BoomPlay? In 2017, the intelligent terminal production service provider Chuanyin Holdings and Netease established a joint venture company Chuanyi Internet, and BoomPlay is a music streaming platform for the African market under Chuanyi Internet.
According to MBW, Boompla can be divided into two modes: free mode and paid mode, and paying users spend about $1.50 per month. At present, BoomPlay has covered most of Africa, with 60 million users, an increase of 18 million compared with February this year, and an increase of about 2 million users every month.

In March 2019, Boomplay announced the completion of the $20 million Series A financing, which was led by Maixing Investment, followed by Yunshi Capital and other strategic investors. The funds raised in this round will be mainly used for music library expansion, product upgrade and talent introduction to support the team to further consolidate its leading position in the African market.
The development of market economy in 54 countries/regions in Africa is very different. Although sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 15% of the global population, it only accounts for 2% of the global record music market, and its streaming media market is "still in its infancy". However, according to IFPI data, South Africa’s streaming media revenue increased by 334.2% in 2016 and 40.2% in 2017, from 8.4 million US dollars in 2016 to 11.78 million US dollars in 2017. Some media believe that Africa’s music industry is a volcano waiting to erupt.

BoomPlay pre-installs the software in the mobile phone due to the advantages of the voice service provider, which not only enhances the competitiveness of the mobile phone, but also brings new users to BoomPlay continuously. Based on Netease’s experience in music streaming media business, with the help of the business advantages of voice transmission in the local market in Africa, the combination of the two makes Boomplay expand rapidly in the African music market.
ByteDance: Short video+streaming media, sweeping overseas music market.
According to CNBC, ByteDance beat Tencent and Baidu in the first half of 2019 and became the second largest digital advertiser in China after Alibaba. Compared with the same period of last year, ByteDance’s advertising revenue in the first half of 2019 increased by 113%, most of which came from its short video platform "Tik Tok" and news information application "Today’s Headlines".
In 2019, TikTok’s overseas version of TikTok achieved amazing growth. It is no exaggeration to say that TikTok has become a global phenomenon. According to the report of Sensor Tower, as of November, TikTok has more than 1 billion users worldwide, with about 800 million active users every month. In June of this year, TikTok users spent a total of $10.8 million, with American users accounting for about 20%. According to foreign media reports, TikTok has made a profit of $175 million on App Store and Google Play Store.


At present, Resso has obtained the copyright of songs from Indian record companies T-Series and Times Music. However, according to informed sources, Resso has not yet reached a copyright agreement with Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.

Tencent: shareholding alliance+strategic investment, layout of Southeast Asia and India markets.
In addition to the eye-catching overseas layout of ByteDance, as early as December 2017, Tencent and Tencent Music Entertainment reached a cooperation in the form of stock exchange alliance, and the two companies jointly held 9.1% of the shares of Spotify, becoming its third largest shareholder. At present, Tencent’s acquisition of at least 10% shares in Universal Music is close at hand.
Last month, according to a Bloomberg report, people familiar with the matter said that Tencent planned to acquire a 10% stake in UMG for $3.3 billion, of which about $2 billion might be in the form of equity financing. The report mentioned that Tencent hopes to complete the acquisition in the next few months, and may recruit more minority investors to acquire up to 20% of the shares of Universal Music. These potential investors include Hillhouse Capital and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte.

According to seven wheat data, JOOX basically occupies the top five positions in the music application rankings of Apple stores in Hong Kong, China, Macau and Southeast Asian countries. JOOX also launched its own service in South Africa in 2017, and ranked fourth in the music application ranking of Apple Store. According to a media report in Bangkok, JOOX currently lives at around 10 million a month.

In addition, in 2017, the national karaoke under Tencent Music Entertainment also launched an overseas version of WeSing to enter the Southeast Asian market. Hundreds of kols from the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia have joined WeSing and uploaded thousands of karaoke videos. In July this year, overseas media reported that "WeSing has been the most popular application among similar products in the Philippines for three consecutive months".
In order to meet the needs of diversified experiences and satisfy the interests of music fans, WeSing cooperated with MYX, the music channel of ABS-CBN, a leading media and entertainment group in the Philippines, and its activities included daily song lists provided by MYX and karaoke programs hosted by celebrities.

Looking at Tencent’s overseas layout, on the one hand, it constantly adds its own good business, on the other hand, it continues Tencent’s consistent idea of leveraging partners to gain opportunities to enter new markets by means of investment, such as using equity transactions with Universal Music and Spotify to enter the mature European and American music markets.
Internet giants in China are stirring up the global music market.
"Its performance in the United States began to take off, especially for young people. Its growth in India is very rapid. I think it has surpassed Instagram in terms of scale. " Zuckerberg’s conversation inside Facebook was leaked, and this one refers to Tiktok.
Undoubtedly, the rapid popularity of Tiktok has brought a great sense of crisis to overseas giants. At the end of last year, Facebook launched a software called Lasso to benchmark TikTok, but its monthly download was less than 1% of TikTok’s-by the end of June 2019, Lasso, a similar short video software of Facebook, had an average monthly download of 15,000 times, while TikTok’s download in January increased by 6.4 million times. On November 12th, Instagram also released a TikTok-like product called Reels. The same is true of Twitter, but its attempt in the field of short video Vine has failed.

In addition, the rapid development of China’s streaming music market has even played a role in forcing the functional innovation of overseas streaming media platforms. For example, Spotify added a video function Canvas this year, allowing artists to insert short videos into playlists and attach GIFs to song playing pages. This is not unrelated to the popularity of short videos.
At the same time, the scrolling of lyrics with tracks is a basic function in China’s music streaming media platform, but due to copyright restrictions in the United States and Britain, there has been no function of displaying lyrics for a long time. In August of this year, Apple Music launched this feature in IOS13, and soon afterwards, Spotify began to test the launch of this feature. Last month, it was reported by the media that Apple Music applied for a patent for lyrics search technology, and it has been released by the US Patent Office.

It can be predicted that with the continuous improvement of the strength of Internet enterprises in China and the further development of the music industry in China, the Internet giants in China will become more and more active on the global stage.
References:
1.https://www.indianweb2.com/2019/12/02/gaana-enters-shows-aim-to-host-indias-largest-podcast-library-by-fy21-end/
2.https://www.marketing-interactive.com/wesing-empowers-the-philippines-with-immersive-experience-in-music-and-beyond/
3.https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-isnt-making-3bn-investment-in-universal-by-itself-report/
4.https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/4/20948731/tiktok-bytedance-china-social-media-growth-users-decline-first-time
5.https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/gaana-raises-115m-led-by-tencent/
6.https://kr-asia.com/spotify-facing-growth-issue-in-asia-where-tencents-joox-is-more-popular
7.https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sony-inks-major-licensing-deal-in-africa-with-boomplay-and-its-60m-users/
8.https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/05/boomplay-a-spotify-style-music-and-video-streaming-service-for-african-music-and-africa-raises-20m/
9.https://www.synchtank.com/blog/africas-perfect-storm-for-the-music-business-is-coming/
10.https://www.ft.com/content/463e2b04-dfbe-11e8-a6e5-792428919cee
11.https://theconversation.com/how-african-countries-are-doing-in-ballooning-digital-music-revenues-116093
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