Netease William Ding’s Dream of Building the Biggest Mobile Social Music Platform

It’s not unusual for a Chinese Internet company as big as Netease to launch a music product — big names including Tencent, Baidu, Sina and Alibaba have had digital music businesses. What makes it slightly different with Netease is William Ding, founder and CEO, once said that he’d found a music label shortly after his company got listed on the NASDAQ in 2000. He tagged himself as a music fan that fancy most genres but rock music.

Spotify isn’t good enough.

it’s not that Mr. Ding is unaware of so many music services out there on domestic and international markets. “There are products by Baidu, Tencent and others, but those are not what I want. Why don’t you create music software with social features enabling music sharing with more people? People said that Spotify was capable of it. But I don’t think it’s very easy to use after having played with it for a while”, he said.

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