Tencent Holdings Ltd’s plan to spinoff its online-music business and list shares in the US is the latest sign that the long-beleaguered recording industry is staging a comeback.
The move will let American investors bet on the Chinese market for music-streaming services, which have brought new life to a business that’s been plagued by piracy. Tencent’s growth in China also mirrors inroads by partner Spotify Technology SA in the US, where streaming has helped music sales grow at their fastest rate since the 1990s.
For record labels, the resurgence has helped them rebuild after years of decline. The demise of physical media and free-downloading sites ravaged the industry. And the arrival of iTunes and legal downloading options in the early 2000s did little to stem the slide. But now streaming appears to have given music sellers a formula they can live with.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
照片：維基共享資源
Tencent, China’s largest social media and gaming company, is still working on terms of its spinoff proposal, which it announced in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange Sunday.
The announcement follows a similar move by Tencent last year in Hong Kong with its online reading business, China Literature Ltd. Its music platforms —QQ Music, KuGou and Kuwo — are becoming important vehicles for pop stars such as Katy Perry and Rihanna to reach a Chinese audience, alongside homegrown artists like Jason Zhang and Joker Xue.
Tencent has the advantage of a fully developed entertainment and content empire that encompasses the ubiquitous WeChat messaging app, games, video-streaming, a karaoke app and content-licensing deals with more than 200 international and domestic record companies. But like perennial rivals Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Baidu Inc and Netease Inc, Tencent has to contend with the rampant piracy that’s eroding the industry’s profits.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
照片：維基共享資源
It also counts Stockholm-based Spotify as an investor, but the two companies may increasingly become rivals. While they don’t compete directly in China, Spotify challenges Tencent in regions such as Southeast Asia.
(Bloomberg)
騰訊控股有限公司計劃分拆旗下線上音樂業務，並在美國上市股票，這是長期陷入困境的唱片業力圖振作的最新進展。
此舉將使美國投資者可對中國的音樂串流服務市場下注，為長久以來受盜版所苦的音樂產業帶來新的生機。騰訊在中國的成長也反映了其合作夥伴Spotify在美國的發展──在美國，串流媒體已幫助音樂的銷售達到自一九九○年代以來最快的成長速度。
對唱片公司來說，銷售的復甦已幫助他們在多年的衰退後重建。實體媒體的消亡和免費下載網站已使唱片產業慘遭蹂躪。在二十一世紀初，iTunes的問世和可合法下載的選項，仍難擋銷售下滑的趨勢。但現在串流媒體似乎已為音樂業者提供了他們可接受的模式。
身為中國最大社交媒體和遊戲公司的騰訊，正著手制定此分拆計畫的條款，這個計畫是本月八日在香港證券交易所提出。
騰訊去年在香港也進行了類似的計畫，分拆旗下的線上閱讀業務──閱文集團。騰訊的音樂平台──QQ音樂、酷狗音樂和酷我音樂──正成為凱蒂佩芮、蕾哈娜等西洋流行歌星，以及張杰、薛之謙等中國本土藝人將觸角伸及中國聽眾的重要傳播媒介。
騰訊的優勢是擁有發展完備的娛樂和內容帝國──包括無所不在的微信即時通訊應用程式、遊戲、影音串流、卡拉OK應用程式，以及與兩百多家國際和國內唱片公司的內容許可協議。但騰訊和它的常年競爭對手阿里巴巴集團控股有限公司、百度股份有限公司和網易公司一樣，也不得不對付猖獗的盜版行為──盜版正在侵蝕產業的利潤。
騰訊仍把瑞典斯德哥爾摩的Spotify視為其投資者，但這兩家公司之間的關係，可能會變得越來越像是競爭對手。雖然他們在中國並沒有直接的競爭，但在東南亞等其他地區，Spotify挑戰了騰訊的地位。
（台北時報林俐凱譯）
The Vinyl Revival
讀後練習
Vinyl records are an analogue format; they get their name from the fact they are made of polyvinyl chloride. From the 1950s until the 1980s and 1990s, vinyl was the predominant format for commercial music recordings, before being superseded by the compact disc format, the first of which were released in Japan on Oct. 1, 1982. Since 2000, CDs themselves have been replaced as the predominant format of music delivery, first by digital downloads – which massively disrupted music industry profit streams – and then by music streaming.
Since 2007, however, there has been something of a revival of interest in vinyl records and analogue record players, and in some areas vinyl is now more popular than it has been since the end of the 1980s.
What is the reason for the vinyl revival? Perhaps it is the “warmer” sound attributed to the analogue format; perhaps it is the appreciation of the album cover art, the tactility of holding a physical record or the feeling of owning an actual object as opposed to digital data, or the impressive sight of a collection of vinyl records lining a wall. Whatever, it does seem that the rumors of vinyl’s demise may have been exaggerated.
(Paul Cooper, Taipei Times)
Historians are rethinking the way the Holocaust is being presented in museums as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camps this month. Shocking images of the mass killings of Jews were “used massively at the end of World War II to show the violence of the Nazis,” historian Tal Bruttmann, a specialist on the Holocaust, told AFP. But in doing so “we kind of lost sight of the fact that is not normal to show” such graphic scenes of mass murder, of people being humiliated and dehumanized, he said. Up to this
When people listen to music today, they typically use streaming services like YouTube or Spotify. However, traditional formats like vinyl records have regained popularity in recent times. Vinyl records are circular discs that store music in grooves on their surfaces and are played on a turntable. As the turntable’s needle runs along these grooves, it picks up vibrations and translates them into sound. The history of vinyl records dates back to the late 1800s, but material and technological challenges delayed mass production until the 1950s. Despite early versions having short playtimes and poor sound quality, vinyl records introduced a new era
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