SubscribeLegitimate Music Retailer 9Sky Raises US$10M
A Chinabyte report says leading online music retailer 9Sky has raised more than US$10M from a Taiwan venture capital, which will get 30%-40% share of 9Sky in this deal. Before that 9Sky has ended financial cooperation with Linktone by the end of last year.
I believe this investment must have been nailed down in the beginning of 2007. In a January Financial Times article, DOWNLOADS HITS RIGHT NOTE IN CHINA, it gives hint that 9sky has got new fund.
The FT article points out the potential competition between 9sky’s paid subscription model and Baidu/EMI’s advertising-supported free streaming service.
By focusing on advertising-supported, free streamed music, Baidu’s EMI tie-up echoes the approach adopted by 9Sky, which recently revamped its site.
As mentioned in the article, 9Sky has revamped its site. Now it looks very 2.0. The homepage is customizable. A big search box is put right in the middle of the page, which suggests that the search feature is taken well care of by their engineers. According to the help page, it will show search suggestions when user types the keywords, although I have got trouble activating this in IE7.
Any registered users can listen to music online without limitation. They can bookmark their favorite songs and tag them. The online music player will show lyrics while playing songs. In search result, it shows button asking users whether they like or dislike the song. It seems compelling recommendation features are being under development.
9Sky sells single song in Rmb 1-5 and monthly subscription for Rmb 20. The FT article says the price is lower than US services. But I tend to agree with Terry, that the price is actually higher if you consider average income of Chinese users.
Speaking of revamping the site, 8box has unveiled a new version before Chinese Spring Festival. Besides a nicer website, they has added some new features. I asked Neo, co-founder of 8box about the new features, here’re his answers:
- A new meta database of music, 1M album,
100M tracks10M tracks. - Every users can write independent reviews for songs. Originally they can only write comment. Now the reviews themselves are comment-able and good reviews will be filtered out in digg style.
- A new online player. Now playlist has drag and drop feature.
Don’t be confused by the number of tracks. Not all of them have playable links and quite a lot of existing links are dead or dying.
So this is a grassroots Vs. royal army game. While more and more traditional online music retailers embrace web 2.0 features and collaborative filtering technologies, the entrance level of music market has risen to a new high.
9Sky is now cooperating with Douban to provide online listening.
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huge music meta infomation with leading recommendation tech.8-box is awesome.
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