Tencent Music Entertainment and AI-generated music
Profile on TME and their genAI music technologies (QQ Music, WeSing, Kugou, and Kuwo Music)
This post covers what’s known about Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), one of the four leading Asian companies in genAI music as of June 2024. Updates will follow as more information becomes known or new product announcements are made.
This post supports Part 3 in our 8-part series on ethics of generative AI for music, announced in this INTRODUCTION post on 6 ‘P's in AI Pods1. Subscribe to be notified when new articles are published (it’s FREE!)
This article is not a substitute for legal advice. It is meant for general information only.
Tencent Music Entertainment (TME, China)
Some of the information in this post is based on articles by Music Business Worldwide and the sources they linked to their articles, as well as TME’s US site and related articles, Pitchbook, and many other searches. Links point to Google-translated pages if translations are available.
History and Partnerships
TME (formerly QQ) was founded in 1998. They are public with a market capitalization over $400B. TME is headquartered in Shenzen, Guangdong, China. Among other businesses, they run WeChat and are major shareholders in companies like Epic Games. TME has 39 subsidiaries and over 100,000 employees.
TME offers features for musicians and for users in a combined Tencent Musician Platform (Chinese, translated) that supports streaming. These include QQ Music, WeSing, Kugou, and Kuwo Music.
The Kugou business page claims a library of over 150 million songs. It lists 12 partnerships and business opportunities. (Their involvement in car music seems to overlap with Kuwo Music). They are also partnering directly with cities in China, such as Xiamen City.
As of Nov. 2022, Tencent Music had released over 1000 songs with AI-generated vocals. One of those songs had been streamed over 100 million times. (ref) This information was MBW “stat of the week” on Nov. 15, 2022 (Murray Stassen).
In its 2023Q1 earnings call, all financial indicators were generally “spectacular”, except that its number of mobile music monthly active users dropped by 6.9% YoY.
By the end of 2023, 480,000 artists using TME’s music creation tools had contributed around 3 million songs to TME’s music platforms. (MBW ref)
Their 2024Q1 report was glowing and reported that in 2023 they had 113.5 million subscribers in China alone with their music services QQ Music, Kugou (which has a karaoke streaming feature), and Kuwou.
TME is actively partnering with artist groups in China for their artists to use TME’s tools. Examples include Time Fengjun Entertainment and HIM International Music. They are also partnering directly with artists and independent musicians. (source)
On June 1, 2024, TME announced buying a 10% stake in Thailand’s GMM Music for $70m. This move follows a previous deal for GMM to promote TME’s WeSing karaoke app. GMM is moving towards an IPO.
TME leads a consortium which now owns 20% of Universal Music Group. UMG is one of the most active music labels in fighting copyright infringement by AI. The latest example: UMG is one of the major plaintiffs in the Suno and Udio lawsuits filed on June 24, 2024.2
Key Features
QQ Music (Chinese) - no translation available. This TME page says QQ was founded in 2005 and “focuses on providing young users with fresh, trendy, and rich music content at home and abroad”.
WeSing (Chinese, translated) - karaoke app - TO DO
Kugou (Chinese, translated) - streaming app. This TME page says Kugou was founded in 2004. It is “considered a cutting-edge platform for discovering popular music trends. Its subsidiaries include:
- Kugou Music: a diversified online music service platform that provides a variety of online entertainment functions.
- Kugou Live: An online live broadcast platform with music as its core, users can watch music performances, concerts, and music variety shows online, and interact with them.”Kuwo Music (Chinese, translated) - This TME page says Kuwo Music was founded in 2005 and “In May 2022, Kuwo Music launched music functions in four major scenarios: sleeping, driving, working, and studying, to create a more practical, immersive, and understanding music scene for users, allowing music to "accompany" them everywhere.” They are the focus of TME’s in-car “companionship scenarios”, having cooperative agreements in place with “more than 60 domestic and foreign car companies, covering more than 80% of car brands on the market”.
Both WeSing and Kugou apps now include an integrated “AI singing” function that lets users sing “duets” with virtual singers.
TME offers AI tools for music creation in Venus, their music production and promotion platform. Venus is available to subscribers of its Tencent Musician Platform (nearly half a million people).
TME’s 2024Q1 report announced that in 2023 they “launched a full suite of AI-powered music production tools on Venus, our all-in-one platform for music production and promotion, and we use AIGC [AI-generated content] tools to improve artists’ music content creation and production efficiency” (per this MBW report).
The Tencent Musician Platform tools include:
Stem separator (ability to separate different music instruments on a recorded track)
Sheet music generator
Lyric-writing assistant
Composition assistant.
Tencent Music has used AI to recreate the voice of Hong Kong-born singer Anita Mui, who died in 2003, as well as Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng, who died in 1995.
MBW reported that in the 2024Q1 report, TME “highlighted the growing number of blockbuster songs that it produced during the quarter, including original soundtracks for trending TV dramas In Blossom and The Legend of Shen Li, which garnered over 150 million streams on its platform within 30 days of release.”
Training Data & Technologies
TME holds over 13,000 granted patents, including on “patented voice synthesis technology” called the Lingyin Engine 3. TME claims it can “quickly and vividly replicate singers’ voices to produce original songs of any style and language” (May 2023 MBW ref).
TME’s corporate responsibility page doesn’t provide any insights about AI training data sources. However, this excellent MBW article on April 23, 2024 by Daniel Tencer provides broad insights into the AI risks identified by TME in their 2024Q1 SEC filing. The short version: TME does not claim to own the rights to all materials used in their AI tools, and they acknowledge that there may (!) be some legal risks.
TME does have a collaboration agreement with UMG, which was renewed in January 2024. The announcement page says that the agreement “renewed a multi-year copyright licensing strategic cooperation agreement”. It states that “TME will continue to distribute UMG’s global music library on its online music platforms such as QQ Music, Kugou Music, and Kuwo Music”.
It’s not clear if the license agreement only covers distribution royalties, or if it also allows use of UMG songs for training their Lingyin Engine or their other AI tools.
So while TME may have used some unlicensed music in their AI platform, at least some of it may have been licensed from UMG.
Ownership, Usage Rights, and Pricing
Insights on ownership & usage rights are scarce on Lingyin Engine and the TME apps. (At least, they are scarce in English; I don’t read much Chinese, and I didn’t find any translatable articles that were helpful). Their emphasis on combining music production, promotion, and listening in their musician platform aligns them with Boomy. Their business model may be that they retain licenses and that creators agree for them to be the (sole?) distributors of music created with their platform.
What’s Next?
Our next posts in the genAI music series will cover 7 major companies outside of Asia, and many more major and minor companies. Stay tuned!
End Notes
See this “AI for Music” page for a complete set of links to all posts and company profile pages in this article series.
![[INTRO] Unfair use? The ethics of generative AI for music](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F163f723a-f4fc-4701-84a8-3a81cad85775_4896x3264.jpeg)
UMG is one of the plaintiffs in the Suno and Udio lawsuits filed on June 24, 2024. TME is a 20% stakeholder in UMG. (link)
