Rhea Liu
Tencent’s QQ Music announced today it has reached a partnership with NetEase Cloud Music for the sublicensing of 1.5 million songs.
It’s reported NetEase will pay an authorization fee plus subsequent dividends to access the QQ Music catalogue in the future. The details of the arrangement are still being negotiated between copyright holders, QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music.
QQ Music owns the copyright to about 15 million songs while NetEase Cloud Music holds copyright licenses for about five million songs. The two sued each other earlier this year for copyright violation.
QQ Music claims to have over 800 million registered users and about 100 million daily active users. NetEase Cloud Music claims to have attracted 100 million registered users as of 2015.
China’s National Copyright Administration launched a policy demanding unlicensed music be removed from all online music service platforms by the end of July.
QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music began negotiating the terms to their partnership prior to the policy announcement, finalising the negotiation process only after the strict new rules were in place. This is the first partnership between online music providers since the strict new rules were enacted.
The two companies also claim there will be more collaboration with the establishment of new business models for online music services following this sublicense partnership.
The cooperation between the two giants may very well reshape the online music market. The Chinese online music market is worth RMB 5.12 billion and is accessed by about 478 million Chinese users, according to the Ministry of Culture.
(Featured photo from Tencent Tech)