The digital music industry in China is estimated to generate annual revenue of CNY 26.94 billion in 2022, according to Statista. Nearly 60% of the market increase is a manifestation of the commercialization of the market. At the same time, it has linked up and downstream enterprises in the music industry chain, bringing new opportunities for the development of the music streaming platforms in China.

Despite its growing market power, however, the country’s music industry lags in one respect: a widespread lack of awareness of the importance of copyright protections. With the robust boom of social media, particularly video streaming apps and short-video apps, China's music industry is changing its tune on copyright. 

China’s music copyright laws are getting an update, including more careful definitions of copyrighted works, and much bigger punitive damages for infringement. There are some big implications for short-video platforms like Douyin, as the use of music in video is now clearly defined, and owners of songs have the right to exercise their copyright where those songs are used in user-generated videos. 

SparkMusic, a Chinese music copyright provider, announced this month that it cooperated with Italian music label Opensound to distribute commercial music copyrights in the Chinese market. This cooperation will provide domestic brand and content service platforms with more diversified music copyright corporate services.

The music commercial distribution platform VFineMusic and video platform Bilibili have reached a music copyright cooperation. VFine will provide Bilibili with an integrated solution for commercial music copyright, formulate and promote the standard of music copyright in social media. 

China's digital music industry compared with other countries is still in its initial stage and enjoys huge future development potential. As one important section in pan entertainment ecology, digital music also attracted many top Internet companies and the competition was once very fierce. Meanwhile, short video platforms also started businesses in the digital music field based on their outstanding music popularization ability, which might give rise to potential competitions to the digital music industry as well. 

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