According to Loretta Chao in the WSJ today, Google China’s free music service (ad supported stream and download of up to 700,000 tracks) is now dispensing around 5m tracks per day. Despite this, and the emergence of 5 major blue chip advertisers, ad revenues are still fairly small. However, Gary Chen, Orca Dgital’s head of sales tells the WSJ that this will change shortly with some major deals in the pipeline.
Takeup is still slow for some reason – of our circle, we don’t know anyone using the service. Chinese music fanatics are still hopelessly wedded to Baidu and the Chinese equivalent of Rapidshare, Rayfile. Unfortunately, music in China = Baidu or Rayfile, similar to the West where search = Google.
Read the whole article HERE.
What a shame, it’s a great service. I’m using it at work and at home here in Foshan, China. Considering all the recent Google woes in The Middle Kingdom, I’ve been worried that the service would go down. It seems to be a bit of a marketing issue, I say target the other Laowais and put on some ESL content for language learners to attract attention. Until then keep the Panda playing his drums CMRadar!