Tencent Music has claimed to have paid more than $84.32 million (590 million yuan) to indie artists during the last three years, as part of the Tencent Musician program.
Tencent Music recently announced the multimillion-dollar milestone via an official release. In the announcement message, the Shenzhen, China-headquartered music streaming service indicated that its indie artist program, Tencent Musician, “has generated 590 million yuan in revenue for original music content creators since its inception” three years ago.
Furthermore, the release detailed the specific ways in which Tencent Music supports independent musicians through the Musician program, including bolstering their on-platform exposure and attempting to help them reach new audiences. And besides the above-mentioned payments, the service – which boasts approximately 800 million monthly active users (MAUs) – conducts “industry seminars for musicians to discuss different industry phenomena and topics,” theoretically helping them to adjust their professional approaches.
The text also noted that Tencent Music booked an array of artists to perform “the offline celebration events of the fourth anniversary” of its July 2016 founding. And lastly, the release reiterated Tencent Music’s commitment to “building a comprehensive social community.” In this vein, we reported earlier in July that the expansion- and growth-minded music streaming service had inked a major anime soundtrack partnership with Tokyo’s CoMix Wave Films.
The press release may have contributed to a small stock market uptick for Tencent Music, which is bought and sold under the symbol TME. At the time of this writing, TME was up nearly three percent on the day, with shares hovering around the $16 mark. Last Friday, the stock dipped as low as $15.26.
Ten days ago, Digital Music News was first to report that Taiwan had moved to block all over-the-top streaming services – including Tencent Music – based out of the Chinese mainland. Lawmakers are reportedly set to discuss (and possibly alter) the legislation during the next two or so months before sending it away to Taiwan’s executive branch.
In other music streaming news, several British MPs have demanded a formal inquiry into the royalties that leading streaming platforms pay artists, stating in a report that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport should “investigate how the market for recorded music is operating in the era of streaming to ensure that music creators are receiving a fair reward.” Though the UK government has yet to confirm any such inquiry, the MPs’ recommendation could have laid the foundation for a full-scale probe into artists’ streaming compensation.