Tencent Music has closed a major partnership deal with GMM Grammy, Thailand’s largest media conglomerate and music company.
GMM and Tencent Music officials recently unveiled their newly inked contract. Under the agreement, the companies will coordinate to discover and promote musicians from (and between) their respective nations. Additionally, Tencent Music will offer GMM artists’ tracks across its Chinese music streaming apps, including QQ Music, Kuwo Music, and KuGou. The announcement message also seemed to indicate that Tencent Music is set to push its WeSing karaoke platform in Thailand while drumming up domestic interest for GMM’s many prominent Thai artists.
GMM maintains 15 record labels, two digital television channels, several radio stations, and much more, comprising a reported 80 percent overall stake in Thailand’s entertainment sphere. Plus, the 36-year-old conglomerate promotes live music (and other crowd-based events) in Bangkok’s GMM Live House, an over 48,000-square-foot concert hall. Given the publicly traded entity’s substantial reach – as well as that of Tencent Music – it appears that the strategic partnership has the potential to produce significant cross-promotional results.
On the day, Tencent Music’s stock (TME) experienced a 1.39 percent dip, with shares trading for $14.15 apiece at the time of this writing. The leading Chinese music streaming service has detailed an array of new partnerships and agreements as of late, but since President Trump signed an executive order banning WeChat (which is also owned by Tencent) earlier this month, shares have continued to descend. Moreover, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin subsequently signaled that China-headquartered companies “will be delisted on the [stock] exchanges” if they fail to abide by American accounting standards.
Also worth noting is that each of Tencent Music’s recent contracts has contained a provision describing a joint talent-discovery and/or developmental initiative. Four days back, for instance, we reported that the streaming service’s licensing deal with Kobalt Music Group encompassed a commitment to jointly spearhead promotional efforts. And Universal Music Group (UMG) and Tencent Music’s “multi-year extension of their licensing agreement” was more direct yet, specifically relaying that the entities would establish a “new joint venture music label.”
That TME shares have failed to pick up steam despite these developments – as well as better-than-expected Q2 2020 earnings, a reported total of 100 million livestream concert viewers, and an anime soundtrack deal with CoMix Wave Films – is almost certainly indicative of investor concerns stemming from the federal government’s increased pressure. Internationally, Japanese lawmakers are considering outlawing TikTok, and Taiwan has taken steps to ban all streaming services from mainland China – including Tencent Music.