China's Alibaba announces to close its Xiami Music App on February 5th, 2021. Xiami was once known to be one of the most prominent Music apps. The app debuted in 2008, and Alibaba acquired the company in 2013. Xiami was known for its elegant design, smart discovery, social features, and indie music, which was a lot to attract users.
The battle of music rights in China and struggles to keep up with the music app competitors provoked the company to take this decision. Tencent bought a major part of the China Music Group's stake, which helped the company boost like none other. Moreover, Tencent Music, by 2017, controlled a massive 75% of total China's music streaming market. Another music competitor NetEase Music is battling with the giant Tencent Music to gain dominance.
In 2015, Alibaba hired two very renowned music veterans to help flourish their newly acquainted music service. However, rather than helping Xiami grow, the veterans kept on adding resources to the platform known as Alibaba Planet in order to establish a relationship between the artists and the fans. Unfortunately, the idea was not a hit.
Well, Alibaba has not stopped participating in the online music streaming market as the company invested nearly $700 million in NetEase Cloud Music service back in 2019.
