Tencent Music Entertainment rules the music coop

The Tencent subsidiary is set for stellar growth and trades cheaply after a margin call fiasco recently. Its market is almost limitless.

- Petri Redelinghuys

Times are changing and they’re changing fast. It feels like just last week that we were all driving around with large CD folders in our cars that our passengers flipped through while looking for something to listen to. Today, things are quite different. We now mostly have music libraries on our phones that we listen to by making use of some sort of music streaming app or service.

As far as streaming services go, Spotify is probably the most well known as it has 345m total users around the world. That’s amazing, right? Not if you consider that despite having so many users the company still lost around $700m last year. Enter the unsung hero of music streaming: Tencent Music Entertainment (TME).

Today, there are around 658m people in China making use of music streaming platforms, of which 622m are making use of one of Tencent Music’s apps (QQ Music, KuGou, and Kuwo). That’s not only 95% of the Chinese market, but also more than the number of users on Spotify and Apple Music combined. Moreover, neither Spotify nor Apply Music stand a chance to compete with Tencent Music in their home market.