On March 17, Tencent Music Entertainment Group unveiled its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2025, showcasing a strong and steady growth trajectory throughout the year and in the final quarter alone.

According to the financial report, Tencent Music’s total revenue for 2025 reached RMB 32.9 billion, marking a 15.8% year-on-year increase. Its adjusted net profit stood at RMB 9.92 billion, up 22% from the previous year. In the fourth quarter, total revenue hit RMB 8.64 billion, a 15.9% year-on-year rise.

While steady growth is crucial, it is equally important to examine how a company interprets and responds to change in an era of rapid transformation.

In recent years, AI has emerged as the most significant disruptor in the business landscape, bringing both new opportunities and challenges to numerous industries. The online music sector has also reached a pivotal turning point as a result.

This moment represents a critical juncture that reveals the strategic mindset and value choices of different platforms.

Online Music: Stepping into the Next Era of Omnichannel Experiences

The core drivers of Tencent Music’s growth in recent years have become clearer, while new avenues for expansion are also emerging.

The financial report reveals that in 2025, Tencent Music’s revenue from online music services reached RMB 26.73 billion, up 22.9% year-on-year, accounting for over 80% of total revenue. Among this, annual revenue from online music subscriptions hit RMB 17.66 billion, a 16% increase from the previous year. This underscores that the subscription business remains one of the most stable and reliable revenue streams for the online music industry.

Whether measured by revenue scale or proportion, the online music business continues to be the primary engine behind Tencent Music’s overall performance, driving its steady progress.

Looking deeper, the industry has undergone profound transformations—driven by evolving user demands and consumption habits, as well as a steady influx of high-quality content across various formats, the relationship between users and online music platforms has grown increasingly intimate, propelling the industry’s commercial logic forward.

In the early days, user needs were relatively simple, focusing mainly on the convenience of “listening to music online.” At that time, online music platforms primarily served as digital record stores—continuously securing copyrights through partnerships with record labels, collaborating with artists to expand their music libraries, and ultimately delivering more music to users.

As users’ copyright awareness grew, more and more began paying for music. When people were willing to spend real money, their focus shifted from merely “having music to listen to” to “listening to good music.”

Consequently, online music platforms, while solidifying their copyright libraries, began enhancing their services through tiered membership systems, higher-quality audio, and richer exclusive benefits, creating a diverse array of membership perks.

For example, QQ Music, a Tencent Music subsidiary, introduced NAC audio quality, Ultra HD 3.0 spatial audio, and Ultra HD Master 4.0, further elevating audio performance and the listening experience.

The financial report shows that in the fourth quarter of 2025, Tencent Music’s number of paying online music users reached 127.4 million, while the average monthly revenue per paying user rose to RMB 11.9, up from RMB 11.1 in the same period of 2024. Thanks to deep collaborations with labels and artists, as well as the launch of high-value new benefits, the number of Tencent Music Super Members (SVIP) surpassed 20 million, setting a new historical record.

In other words, the relationship between users and platforms has evolved into a more stable, sustained, and in-depth consumption dynamic.

In recent years, as user consumption logic has gradually shifted from “cost-effectiveness” to “emotional value,” music—as a key carrier of emotions—has transformed into a lifestyle that can be participated in, experienced, and collected.

Following this shift, the value proposition of online music platforms continues to expand, with the boundaries between online listening and offline experiences gradually blurring. Beyond its core strength in “music listening,” Tencent Music has also developed richer and more diverse consumption scenarios, including offline events, artist albums, and merchandise.

From an offline perspective, in 2025, Tencent Music successfully hosted multiple flagship events. Notably, G-DRAGON’s 2025 large-scale tour, operated by Tencent Music, featured 20 shows across 8 cities in the Asia-Pacific region, attracting over 260,000 attendees in total.

Meanwhile, the launch of physical merchandise alongside album releases has further innovated music consumption formats. In addition to G-DRAGON’s 2025 World Tour official merchandise for the Chinese mainland, Tencent Music also collaborated with artists such as Lay Zhang and Lu Han to release tour-related products and celebrity merchandise, catering to a wider range of user preferences.

The financial report shows that Tencent Music’s non-subscription revenue from online music reached RMB 9.07 billion in 2025, up 39.2% year-on-year. In the fourth quarter, non-subscription online music revenue hit RMB 2.54 billion, a 40.8% increase, outperforming market expectations. Such remarkable growth indicates that the diversified businesses derived from music itself are opening up new growth opportunities.

New growth opportunities require new metrics. The strong growth in non-subscription online music business has diversified Tencent Music’s growth drivers, working alongside the online music subscription business to create a more mature and well-rounded overall business structure. Against this backdrop, Tencent Music announced that it would no longer disclose traditional operational metrics such as monthly active users (MAU) for online music on a quarterly basis, instead shifting to annual disclosure of total paying users across its music services. This choice better reflects the company’s overall business structure amid a backdrop of business diversification.

Ultimately, the evolution of the online music industry is fundamentally a process of deepening the relationship between people and music—from “connecting to content” to “enhancing quality” and finally to “experiencing everything related to music.” Each leap forward is the result of platforms understanding user needs and redefining music consumption.

Under its “Content and Platform as Two Wings” strategy, Tencent Music, which continues to solidify its identity as a “one-stop music service platform,” is entering a new cycle of value growth.

AI Surge: Tencent Music’s Balanced and Forward-Thinking Approach

Over the past two years, the AI wave has swept through the music industry at an unprecedented pace.

Amid this wave, some have adopted aggressive strategies, while others have panicked, leading to a series of industry disruptions. For instance, a large number of AI-generated cover songs are flooding social and online music platforms, many of which generate revenue without proper copyright authorization from the original singers or songwriters.

While this may seem like technological innovation, it is, in fact, a shortcut that bypasses the compliance processes of content creation and copyright ownership, naturally touching on the music industry’s most sensitive boundaries—copyright and creator rights.

This shortcut may generate some traffic and buzz in the short term, but if allowed to proliferate, it will ultimately undermine and erode not only the creative value of musicians but also the content ecosystem of the platforms themselves.

As an industry leader, Tencent Music has maintained a balanced and forward-thinking stance in the face of the AI wave.

This composure stems from its long-term industry perspective—only by respecting creators and copyright value can technological innovation truly become a lasting capability. While technology can lower the barriers to creation, artistic aesthetics, emotional expression, and long-accumulated creative abilities remain at the core of music content.

Based on this perspective, Tencent Music consistently focuses on using AI to assist creation, rather than replace it.

For example, Tencent Music’s Rising Star “AI Song Creation” feature is integrated as a module within products like QQ Music and Kugou Music, providing one-stop solutions for composition, lyric writing, and arrangement. Users can simply input text descriptions or upload images, and the system will generate complete songs for them.

By the end of 2025, to make music creation more convenient and focused for both artists and users, Tencent Music launched Vemus, a one-stop AI music creation tool. According to the financial report, it has already helped over 150,000 musicians and more than 10 million ordinary users create music more efficiently.

It is clear that on the creation side, Tencent Music respects and values copyrights and musicians, ensuring a legitimate music library while encouraging artists and users to leverage AI tools. By combining human aesthetic inspiration and value creation, it expands the boundaries of music content creation.

AI: Enhancing Music’s Connection with Users

If Tencent Music maintains a relatively cautious approach toward AI in music creation, it is even more proactive in upgrading and applying AI technologies in content distribution and consumption to further optimize music-related services, integrating AI into its very fabric.

From a broader historical perspective, the development of the music industry is, in fact, an evolutionary history of content distribution. During the cassette and CD eras, music dissemination relied heavily on physical channels such as record stores. Later, digital downloads and P2P sharing freed music from physical media constraints. The emergence of streaming platforms further shortened the path between music creation and distribution.

Entering the AI era, the content distribution capabilities of online music platforms have evolved once again: from user-initiated searches to algorithm-driven intelligent recommendations.

Over the past year, Tencent Music has continuously optimized its recommendation features using its self-developed multimodal large model. By understanding user behavior data and content characteristics in multiple dimensions, it has improved distribution efficiency while making music recommendations more precise, intelligent, and aligned with users’ personalized preferences. As a result, Tencent Music’s share of recommended playback reached an all-time high.

Meanwhile, QQ Music, a Tencent Music subsidiary, integrated Tencent’s AI application Yuanbao, allowing users to discover songs based on lyric snippets, emotional atmospheres, or scenario descriptions.

In addition to smarter and more convenient recommendations that increasingly “understand” users, Tencent Music’s platforms have also introduced features like AI Performers, AI Exclusive Companions, and AI Listening Partners to provide users with richer and more novel AI application experiences.

On the other hand, facing today’s increasingly diverse music consumption trends, Tencent Music leverages its leading AI technologies to enhance and reinforce these experiences.

For example, QQ Music’s AI Agent, powered by Yuanbao, has upgraded into a system-level hub—beyond just “finding songs,” it now directly connects to diverse scenarios such as purchasing digital albums and merchandise, delivering a “what you think is what you get” experience and providing users with a shorter, more direct path.

In summary, Tencent Music focuses on protecting creator rights in music creation while more actively introducing AI in application scenarios. Facing the surging AI wave, Tencent Music, at the forefront of the industry, has found its own rhythm.