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QQ Music

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QQ Music

QQ Music (Chinese: QQ音乐) is one of three Chinese freemium music streaming services owned by Tencent Music. As of 2018, the service is set to reach over 700 million users with an estimated 120 million subscribers.

The service merged with China Music Corporation, the owner of KuGou and KuWo, the second and the third largest music streaming services respectively in the country, in 2016. By 2018, QQ Music's market share among mainland China's music platforms increased to 75%.

Outside of streaming, the service leverages its brand to the public through the annual QQ Music Awards.

QQ Music operates under a freemium business model in which basic services are free whilst enhanced features are available on a subscription. However unlike similar subscription service Spotify, labels have the ability to restrict its content to be restricted to subscribing users (known as VIPs or green diamonds) or be purchasable on their website which usually costs around 19 to 20 yuan. Artists using this strategy include Noah Cyrus, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift in which certain albums are restricted to be purchased only.

QQ Music generally encourages users to purchase their VIP subscription service.

As of March 2020, QQ Music offers three subscription types.

QQ Music only operates in China, however, for an uncertain amount of time, the free service was freely available to be used worldwide, and many international users used the service in order to circumvent paid services such as Apple Music or Spotify. In 2016, to strengthen copyright restrictions, QQ Music blocked international users, and users overseas will generally receive an error message when trying to play music, such as: '抱歉,应版权方要求,暂无法在当前国家或地区提供此歌曲服务' ('Sorry, this song is not yet available in the current country or region at the request of the copyright owner'). In 2017, Alibaba Music and Tencent Music had a deal to collaborate on music copyright allowing Alibaba Music service Xiami and QQ Music to share exclusive copyright deals. However, Alibaba Music has exclusive rights to certain SM Entertainment Korean releases (such as Luna, EXO, EXO-CBX, Girls' Generation) meaning that QQ Music and other competing service's users will not be able to stream these songs. The rights to SM Entertainment music were returned as a shared entity to QQ Music when Tencent Music Entertainment and SM Entertainment signed a deal in 2019.

On September 6, 2023, QQ Music shut down their Penguin FM (企鹅FM) service preventing further sale or download of non-purchased content.

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