Owner Baidu | Availability China | |
Baidu Music is a Chinese music streaming service by Baidu. By December 2015, it had 150 million monthly active users.
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History
In December 2015, Baidu announced that they merged Baidu Music with the record company Tianhe Music Group, which owned the copyrights to 700,000 at the time and had licenses with overseas record labels; this allowed Baidu to include more songs within their streaming service.
Copyright infringement
In 2008, record companies Universal Music, as well as the Hong Kong divisions of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and Warner Brothers, brought Baidu to court in China for allegedly linking to unauthorized copies of music with their music search engine. The record companies lost the case. Later, in 2011, Baidu signed contracts with record companies that allowed them to receive compensation when a user downloads or streams a song; advertisements on the service's website helped pay for the songs' licensing fees without making Baidu's music search engine a paid-for service.