Tencent Music‘s online music paying users reached 60.9 million in Q1 2021, increasing by 42.6% year-over-year or 4.9 million additional users from Q4 2020 (the largest quarterly net increase since 2016), according to the company’s financial results.
Tencent Music’s Paying ratio increased to 9.9%, up from 8.0% and 9.0% in the third and fourth quarters of 2020, respectively. Its mobile MAU for online music platforms saw a decrease of 6.4% YoY in Q1 2021 to 615 million.
Tencent Music upgraded its products to be more social, personalized, and visually appealing during the first quarter of 2021:
- Putong Community has continued to gain popularity, growing in user penetration and retention rate quarter-over-quarter, and has become one of the leading channels for fan-idol interaction and content promotion.
- Kugou Fans Club has also drawn many leading artists, labels and content IPs to interact with their fans live, resulting in an increasing proportion of young users in this community, as well as sequential increases in penetration and time spent per user.
For long-form audio, it made noteworthy progress in both integrated and standalone approaches, as well as its monetization during the first quarter of 2021:
- After exceeding 100 million MAUs at the end of 2020, MAU penetration reached 20.0% compared to 5.5% in the first quarter of 2020.
- Significantly enriched long-form audio content offering with the number of licensed titles more than quadrupled year-over-year.
- Accelerated the addition of PUGC and UGC long-form audio content. QQ Music launched the Ground Zero Podcast program, which offers financial resources and tools that enable original podcast content creation.
- In March 2021, it completed the acquisition of Lazy Audio and started consolidation. It also integrated Kuwo Changting with Lazy Audio to form Lanren Changting in April, a new brand for Tencent Music’s long-form audio business
- It recently started its foray into ad-based monetization giving users easy access to a vast amount of high-quality audio content.
China online entertainment market overview 2021
Financial Highlights
Total revenues were RMB7.82 billion (US$1.19 billion), representing an increase of 24.0% year-over-year.
- Online music services revenues grew by 34.5% year-over-year.
- Revenues from music subscriptions were RMB1.69 billion (US$258 million), representing 40.2% year-over-year growth.
- Revenues from advertising services recorded over 100% year-over-year growth.
Net profit was RMB979 million (US$149 million) and net profit attributable to equity holders was RMB926 million (US$141 million). Non-IFRS net profit was RMB1.24 billion (US$188 million) and Non-IFRS net profit attributable to equity holders was RMB1.18 billion (US$180 million).