China Mobile, Beijing-based top100.cn, Shanghai-based Shanda's digital home entertainment company and Aigo Music have teamed up with well-known music companies from both China and overseas. All of them are trying to build their own legitimate music library.

Turning music into digital format allows each song of an album to be sold individually, giving fans the freedom to choose just the hits they want.

This April, mainland music producer Zhang Yadong, who is known for producing pop diva Faye Wong's hit albums, released his personal album Underflow online by cooperating with China Mobile music club, which guarantees copyright protection. Popular songs, such as Faye Wong's I Love You and Zhang's own songs have become hot hits. The number of downloads hit 15 million in one month.

"The number is far more than CD sales," Zhang says. In today's market, if an album reaches the 50,000 sales figure, it is cause for a music company to celebrate. "Music downloading brings profits which cannot be compared with CDs," he says.

Producer Zhang Yadong believes the Internet offers more opportunities for musicians lacking the support of big record labels. [Guo Yingguang]

But as a professional music producer, Zhang says that selling individual tracks breaks up the continuity of a full album. "I like a complete concept behind an album. One single is not enough to express an artist's feeling or story," he says. "But singers have to feed themselves first to create more music. The compromise is inevitable."

Putting music online also benefits the artists. Zhang points out that nowadays, thanks to the Internet and the changing habits of music fans, non-mainstream musical genres and artists have better prospects.

"In the past, big record labels invested vast sums of money to market their musicians' albums to radio, to MTV and to CD shops. Anyone not represented by any of these labels, independent musicians, struggled for the spotlight," he says. "But now, artists can break into a new scene by uploading their music online and approach listeners directly."

Zhang's own music company, Dong Music International, targets new talents. "The current music scene is unhealthy. If we have 1,000 new songs within a year, 800 are bound to sound similar. Chasing after one successful genre, such as R&B and Hip Hop, hinders diversity," says Zhang. "New musicians are throwing out convention. They are trying different styles by moving away from mass tastes.

"Music downloading offers them a chance to get their efforts across to the listeners. There are lots of newbies out there, people who don't know any of these bands, and they could easily buy one song."

The biggest challenge to the development of China's Internet music market is consumers' reluctance to pay for legitimate copies of music, according to Song. The industry needs to come together to change this mindset. The introduction of relevant laws will also aid the industry's growth.

"The business model for China's digital music industry is not yet fully developed," says Song. "There will be many forms of digital music that play music with high original sound quality rivaling that found in traditional records."

(China Daily July 28, 2009)