KKBOX Inc, the nation’s largest online music service provider, yesterday said it aims to beef up presence in Japan with plans to expand its digital music subscription service to other telecom operators next year.
KKBOX, which launched its service applications in Japan in June, is giving its current partner and stakeholder KDDI Corp a lead time with its service and it is mulling to work with other partners during the second half of next year, chief operating officer Izero Lee (李明哲) said yesterday.
By teaming up with Japan’s major telecoms providers, KKBOX expects revenue contribution from the Japanese market to surge and match that of Taiwan next year, he said.
That is based partly on the flat-rate monthly subscription fee in Japan being ￥1,480 (US$19) — about four times as much as the NT$149 that Taiwanese users pay per month.
“Japan only caught on to the smartphone craze earlier this year and its music industry has great potential because it is the second-largest in the world after the US in terms of the recording industry’s output,” Lee said.
Its Japanese service, dubbed “Lismo unlimited,” offers more than 1 million titles in the database for users to load onto their Android-based smartphones.
It is an “all-you-can-eat” package — a new business model in Japan, where the single-song-download model is currently more popular.
The music service provider is also planning to launch a Lismo service running on Apple’s iOS by next month, given that KDDI, Japan’s No. 2 telecoms services provider, has started selling the iPhone 4S. In the past, Softbank enjoyed an exclusive partnership with Apple to sell iPhones in Japan.
KKBOX, which is 67.5 percent owned by KDDI and 11.1 percent by HTC Corp (宏達電), said that its combined number of subscribers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan is expected to surpass 1 million by the end of next year, a growth of about 50 percent on this year.
The company is also hoping for a breakthrough in Singapore next year when it debuts its service in the city state. It has approached telecoms operators Singapore Telecommunications Ltd and StarHub Ltd, but negotiations with Singaporean record labels on royalties have not gone smoothly.
This story has been updated since it was first published.
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