The largest search engine in China is Baidu and it has a entered into an agreement with a tri-party venturing group which consists of Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music. This agreement was entered into so that Baidu gets a go ahead for distribution of songs via its search service which is for mp3. This agreement thus ended the legal war which was in action for years. The reason for the wrangling was that Baidu was charged with encouragement of piracy.
Baidu did sign yet another deal which was with One-Stop China. This deal was entered into so that Baidu could use the latter’s categories in music and even the newly released ones so that it could be downloaded as well as streamed from the servers of Baidu. Ting was yet another launch from Baidu which was a platform for social music. Baidu’s deal with One-Stop China however had another appeasing agreement which had Beijing High People’s Court endorsing and it ended the pending litigation which had the above mentioned three parties involved for the deal.
There was an acquisition made by Music studio against the search engine that it was encouraging pirated music through its search service. This gave rise to pirated music as they were downloaded by numerous users. Hong Kong’s analyst, Dick Wei said that the agreement would do only good to the search engine and would also help Baidu’s strategies such as ‘box computing’ of making more and more information available on its site. Dick Wai is an analyst with J P Morgan.
What does this deal mean? This would state that Baidu will as per the terms pay a remuneration fee to the original owners of the music content. This would be done on a pre-download or a pre-play basis for each and every track which is used on Ting or its own music search service. Talking about its partnership with one-stop China, Jennifer Li, CEO of Baidu said that this partnership would mark a new beginning would be exciting. She entrusted her confidence saying that it is a win-win partnership and Chinese record companies, recording artists and music fans would only benefit from this deal.
Baidu’s spokesman, Kaiser Kuo said that Baidu has process on for the music catalogue uploads to the server. He added that the company however is not working on a clean-up for the site. This means that the illegal music is here to stay for some more time on Baidu. So, if one makes a search for any mp3 search on Baidu with a popular title, then for the time being one would get links which have a decent mix of illegal download links along with the legal ones.
On the monetary terms, Hong Kong based analyst, Wallace Cheung forcasted that the agreement would have a positive effect for sure, but it may not earn huge profits from Ting in the time to come to compensate the payments their have to make for content. However the government of China detailed that with over 450 million netizens, it still has an internet market which is the biggest in the world. Again it was know that last year online music users list counted 362 China.
Baidu has however just strengthen its agreement list as it had even partnered Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC) which was for paying fees to MCSC. This fee was payable for all the songs which were downloaded. It is not known to many but Baidu even has a deal with EMI Group via this one.
Â