How Chinese copyright laws translate to supporting a commercial ecosystem for the trade of rights in China is a convoluted area of investigation at best. For those looking to distribute music here, the terms of engagement are murky and seemingly ad-hoc for the most part, particularly for smaller businesses that lack a local presence and/or big-name artists with sizeable fan bases.
Luckily for us, The Global Outpost has just posted an article that presents one of the best overviews of our current state of affairs available in English, for the international music community to grumble over. The author touches on a number of themes we have been keeping an eye over for some time, and raises important questions relating to the increasing trend of competing services using exclusive content licenses as a means of differentiating:
“An ‘arms race’ to sign up more content either in the guise of ‘distribution’ or as exclusives will only benefit artists in the long term if proper promotions and artist information are developed alongside it.“