But it is all in Chinese, I can’t read Chinese and why would I bother?
There is a possibility that your distributor or label might have at sometime distributed your music in the past to China and it is now floating around somewhere out there. This search will find if your music is there, it may be just a catalogue list with no sound file or it may be that it wasn’t properly removed when you changed labels or distributors and was left with no one to claim its license. If you do find your music in the search to your surprise, then you may contact your current or previous label or distributor to claim the licence or you may inquire a distributor like Musicinfo who specializes in digital music distribution to China to help claim your music.
Or you know that you have distributed your music there but have never seen where it is or it has been just too much of a pain to try and look. This should help.
Navigating new websites can be a headache especially when they are in a different language. It takes time to understand get to know how the website functions, like if I push this button what will it do and where will it take me. This is especially difficult if the website was built using a different language.
One solution that I have used when searching for music on Chinese streaming sites is by using Safari Translate or Google Chrome Translate. It doesn’t do a perfect job as most often the translations are literal and coming from such a distant language as Chinese to English there will definately be some surprises and you will have to be creative to figure out just what the heck the translator is trying to tell you. But for the most part you can now figure out where to go and this is of course useful in any language if English is not your language of choice.
Another difficulty is the format of the page. For the most part the page will be in the same format but at the translator tries to fit the new word into a space where there is no room there will be word overlap especially in the search box which can then make using the search box a challenge. But you can always switch back to the original language, do your search and then re-translate the page.
The Search for Your Music
The search parameters are, singer (artist), album, song. You need to try and search for any or all of these. Remember these websites were built for Chinese and so the search is also built for Chinese so the search can be finicky. Once you have found a search criteria that relates you the artist, album or song. You can click on the either one of those links to find what you are looking for. It seems that also the categorization of these criteria can get mixed up with other similar artists, albums or songs.
For our search we will be visiting the biggest streaming services; Tencent Music Entertainment hosing: QQ Music, Kuwo Music and Kugou Music; Netease Cloud Music, aka. Music163 or just Netease Music; and Taihe hosted QianQian. If your music is not on one of these then your music is most likely not in China. I would have also included Alibaba’s Xiami but sadly it will be discontinued in February.
With most of these streaming service they work best in China and also they have been optimised to be used on the client app. All of the sites are workable outside of China on the browser website with the exception of Kugou which requires the use of the client app to do the search. And unfortunately there is no language option and because you are no longer using a browser, can’t translate.
First we check out QQ for it is the biggest and if your music is not on here then most likely it will not be on Kugou or Kuwo either. Then we will check, Netease as it is the second biggest streaming service. Then we will look at QianQian, because depending on your distributor your music may or may not be on Taihe’s QianQian, but nowadays most all distributors who have China in their distribution will send your music to both, either, or Tencent Music Entertainment streaming sites and Netease.
Here are the links to your music in China:
Tencent QQ Music
Tencent Kuwo
Tencent Kugou
>
Netease Cloud Music
QianQian
Musicinfo
