An ecosystem lens: Putting China’s digital music industry into focus

The digital disruption of the global music industry hits the value chain for recorded music hard. In China, new digital service providers began to amass large user bases, offering a variety of services based on e-commerce and social messaging applications. In a low-intellectual property environment, these services have become the primary sources of digital music streaming via the Internet and increasingly through mobile telephony. This article reviews the literature on the value chains within the Chinese music industry, compares a classic business ecosystem model with a more recent model, and examines available user data on current Chinese music streaming services. We then suggest an ecosystem framework toward understanding the digital music industry in China and discuss how this framework maps to recent developments in China’s digital music industry.