Taylor Swift poses with her trophies at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards. (Photo : Getty Images)
China has over 200 music charts, making it difficult to identify which song really makes it to the top spot. One can have a popular boyband at no. 1, while another has a song from a movie soundtrack topping other tracks.
In the U.S. and a lot of foreign territories, Billboard magazine is widely considered as one of "the powers that be" when it comes to rating a multitude of musical genres.
So it is not surprising that music video streaming Yinyuetai.com has decided to partner with the media giant in its plans to become the authority on music charts.
The website will regularly feed Billboard with the latest Chinese music statistics, which Billboard will then publish online. The aim is to take Chinese hits out into the mainstream along the level of Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Adele.
"Enough eyes are around the music business of China now and people really need and want to know who is up and who is down," Jonathan Serbin, Billboard's head of Asia, said. "In the past few years, China's music industry has developed a critical mass that can support a chart to really track what is happening in the music business."
The dawn of Internet access to music has given music companies a hard time selling music. Compared to the U.S.'s $3.5 billion market in digital music, China's $91.4 million is nearly negligible.
"The market is at an inflection point in size from a developing market to a very large music market," said Serbin.
Statistics say that there are 478 million online music listeners in China. It's just a matter of how to get this almost half a billion population to buy music.
As support to the local music industry, Beijing stepped in and mandated music streaming sites to block illegally acquired materials.
"The government crackdown brings us huge opportunity," said Serbin. "The hope is, as the fight to piracy continues, the legitimate market will continue to grow."
