Music streaming site Xiami finally launched its Artists Channel where independent artists or signing singers can share their music, interact with fans and sell songs.
Artists can upload and sell their music pieces on the channel and set the price on their own (0-50RMB). Users have to pay if they would love to download the music. The company made a promise that in two years any revenues generated from this channel will go to the artists while it will take no revenue cut. Xiami also specified that either party who creates the lyrics or the music of a song will be sharing 10% of the whole revenues, and the left 80% goes to the artist. So original songwriters can still benefit from downloads of re-rewritten songs by other artists.
The checkout system is supported by Alipay (Alibaba acruqired Xiami last year). Artists now only need to log in their Alipay accounts to check their music income. According to Xiami later on automatic monthly settlement and billing will be available for the music platform.
In the following days, Xiami will also provide marketing tools for artists and music labels. “Those labels showed great interest in us since they hope to spot some hidden potential artists from our platform, ” said Zhu Qi, the contents director of Xiami.
Founded as a P2P music site in 2008, Xiami has insisted on paid music downloading service but was struggling in the deep for the copyright issues. The revenues from ads and downloads could hardly afford the copyrights. Luckily Alibaba came to rescue and the cost dilemma was solved.
Currently Xiami has 15-20million registered users, and 6-7million active users (0.8% are paid users). “If we manage to raise the rate of active users to 5%, possibly the digital music market will grow to tens of billion RMB. We always heard the saying that music has died. But I believe that we just need a little faith to make some change via the Internet”, said Wang Hao, co-founder and CEO of Xiami.
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