How fighting piracy built Tencent’s music streaming empire, QQ Music, in China

This article explores how Tencent, which owns QQ Music and WeChat, was able build a successful paid music streaming service in China with a focus on omni-channel marketing, volume of subscriptions over price, and music label partnerships.

How fighting piracy built Tencent's music streaming empire, QQ Music, in China 

Low Lai Chow

It wasn't that long ago, as Andy Ng, general manager of QQ Music at Tencent would have you know, that the music market in China looked rather dismal.

"There wasn't much of a hope really," he confessed in a keynote presentation at the recent All That Matters 2016 conference in Singapore last week.

"Everything was pirated and there was no business model."

A pioneering force in China's developing paid digital music industry, Internet giant Tencent owns the country's current largest streaming music platform, QQ Music,...

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