Baidu Music, Taihe Entertainment Group Announce Merger

Baidu Music

, the world's largest Chinese-language music search platform, and Taihe Entertainment Group, a leading Chinese music service provider, today announced plans to merge. The new company will combine Taihe's upstream strengths—its extensive intellectual property, and its artists and repertoire (A&R) resources—with Baidu Music's powerful downstream digital platform and distribution capabilities. The merger represents a breakthrough in the digital music industry—the first-ever full integration of a leading Internet platform and a traditional music company. The two partners each contribute strategically valuable and complementary resources and expertise to the new company. With over 150 million monthly active users, Baidu Music is the first stop for Chinese music fans looking for the music they want online, and brings the power of search technology, big data, and massive online infrastructure to the new company. Taihe Entertainment Group has deep experience in music operations and licensing, and holds the rights to over 700,000 recordings with tremendous commercial value, along with long-term cooperation agreements with hundreds of international and domestic music institutions. The merger of Baidu Music with Taihe is the latest move by Baidu to open up quality assets to financial and strategic investment. This strategy, which has already opened properties like Baidu Takeout Delivery, 91 Desktop, and Zuoyebang to outside investors, aims to promote the independent development of these quality assets, and to foster the development of Baidu's open ecosystem to better connect people with services. As the intellectual property regime continues to improve in China and users are increasingly willing to pay for online content, prospects for the Chinese digital music industry look increasingly bright. The fusion of Baidu Music and Taihe will release tremendous energy from both sides and will power the music business through its next stages of development.