Your Music is in China or is it?

Streaming music is becoming more complex as the amount of services grows. Distributors and labels are constantly updating their distribution services to better serve their artists. For the vast majority of listeners streaming has taken over leaving physical recordings as a memento of collectables with their unique audiophiliac characteristics.

The door is always open for new tech to continually expand ways to share your music. It isn’t limited to new services and new platforms but also new mediums and media. Music NFT’s are growing more and more popular allowing creators to control their music and its copyright directly from their hands to the hands of their users, like a musical trading card.

Distributors and labels may or may not automatically add the new services to your distribution. It has come across our attention that many artists don’t know if their music has been or is in China or not,or the reports they receive from their music usage doesn’t reflect any usage in China.

Nowadays the majority of the typical digital music distributors have distribution to Tencent Music Entertainment aka, TME which includes QQ Music, Kuwo Music and Kugou Music, and they may also have distribution to Netease Cloud Music.

This is a list of known distributors who distribute only to TME and/or Netease Cloud Music:

· Cdbaby

· Tunecore

· Ditto

· Distrokid

· Symphonic

· Landr

· Spinnup

· Imusician

· Soundrop

· Horus

· Novacore

If you have distributed your music with one of these distributors most likely your music is on TME or Netease already, but you would need to check with your distributor if they in fact do so. This list also does not include all the independent labels that may also have distribution to China.

But you ask, “Why only these two services?” Well, these services are still accessible from their native websites and don’t yet require you to download a desktop or mobile app to access their service, which makes the search possible. And while they no longer hold exclusive rights to the music they would still have the music in their catalogues.

Once you know if your music is in China, so what?

Have you ever heard of the World Intellectual Property Organization aka, WIPO? They are the specialized agency of the United Nations created to promote and protect intellectual property, your copyright. In China the compliment organization is The National Copyright Administration of China aka, NCAC.

The NCAC just this January gave the order that digital music platforms are not allowed to sign exclusive copyright agreements except in special circumstances. This was enforced to crack down on monopolistic behavior in the private sector. Tencent aka TME ended all its exclusive rights agreements, whose library held over 80% exclusive music. This has also affected the other big providers like Netease, Xiaomi and China mobile, amongst others.

This means that the market has been thrown open because these monopolistic providers are no longer able to use exclusive copyright to leverage their positions. The catalogues of music in China are now much more accessible to the vast amount of independent music providers. The question for you is how are you going to get your music to all these providers.

Amongst the many numerous music and media services in China most of them are simply not accessible outside of China or if they are they don’t actually have a search option. For example, have you ever tried to search for your music on Tunein? Nah, it doesn’t work does it? So how do you know for sure that your distributor has actually distributed your music there? From your streaming statistics reports.

It is too common that musicians don’t have a clue about their music in China. I have heard from our artists that the reports they receive from their global distributors from music distributed to China, is scarce, if at all.

Do your reports from China look like this?

All the numbers in this chart are simulated for example only

Why leave your music to compete against the top 100 artists on the biggest streaming platforms when you can give yourself the edge and have your music available to a much wider audience? When you distribute with Musicinfo it also includes sync licensing to make your music available for movies, tv series, vloggers and more. And if you already have your music in China and would like to supplement it with sync licensing we can do that too. Please come search to see if your music is in China and choose your music’s next destination, with Musicinfo.

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