中文导读
过去，中国音乐市场盗版横行，鲜有用户为音乐付费。而如今，得益于流媒体的迅猛发展、移动支付的轻松快捷，音乐付费时代已然来临。尽管当前腾讯一家独大、未授权音乐仍旧泛滥，中国音乐市场的大趋势令人欣喜。
Thanks to streaming services, China’s consumers are now paying for music
HONEST souls intent on paying full whack for the music they listen to used to have a hard time in China. In the era of compact discs, rare was the shop which did not sell counterfeits. The same held true when discs turned into downloads and online streams of songs: hardly any service charged money.
Slowly but surely, China is becoming a market where people pay for music. Over the past five years, digital-music revenues for the recording industry nearly quadrupled, to $195m; most of that amount comes from music streaming (see chart). That sum may still be a tiny fraction of the global total of $7.8bn, but streaming has clearly taken off in China.
Not everybody is paying: of the 600m Chinese who listen to music online only 20m have a paid subscription, which costs between 8 and 12 yuan (between $1 and $2) a month. The rest tune in for nothing, but many do so on legal, advertising-supported services—Chinese equivalents of the free option on Spotify, the world’s biggest streaming service (which is not available in the country). “Piracy is collapsing,” says Ed Peto of Outdustry, a firm in Beijing offering services to the music industry.
If Chinese consumers have developed a liking for legal listening, it is for a combination of reasons. Smartphones, which have become ubiquitous in recent years, make it easy to subscribe to streaming services. Widespread use of apps such as Alipay and WeChat Pay mean that younger Chinese, in particular, are now used to making small purchases digitally. And, to take advantage of the commercial opportunities in music, China’s big internet platforms have begun to fight piracy.
