According to the Digital Market Outlook released by Statista in 2017, the total scale of the Chinese digital music industry in 2016 was approximately 454 million U.S. dollars. Broken down by format, revenue generated from music streaming in that year amounted to around 417 million U.S. dollars while music downloads contributed approximately 37 million U.S. dollars. Apparently, Streaming services have taken over as the main source for digital music in the country. It was expected that the annual subscription revenue of the online music streaming industry in China would amount to 4.37 billion yuan by 2018. In terms of devices used to stream music, over 70 percent of Chinese digital music consumers accessed online music streaming platforms via apps on their smartphones.
According to statistics about the penetration ranking of music streaming apps among Chinese digital music users, QQ Music ranked first as the most popular music app in the public, with a penetration rate of 69.9 percent, closely followed by KuGoo Music with 68 percent. In 2016, KuGoo Music, Kuwo Music were acquired by Tencent and integrated with QQ Music, becoming Tencent Music Entertainment Group. This means that Tencent Music with QQ Music, KuGoo Music, Kuwo Music has a market share of more than 70 percent of China's digital music, dominating also in terms of copyright. On the other hand, Baidu, NetEase Cloud and Xiami Music also have their own share of a slice of the cake.
In China, the most listened to type of music still remain Chinese songs. Survey results from 2016 depicts that over 70 percent of the Chinese mobile users aged between 29 and 48 years frequently listened to Chinese songs, while more than 30 percent of users aged between 19 and 28 years preferred to listened to English songs. Roughly 60 percent of respondents did not want to pay for online music because they could find free streaming services. Approximately half of the mobile music listeners in China did not participate in the social interactions on music platforms, they preferred only to listen.
