NetEase Cloud Music is equipped with what the co touts as an industry-leading music library in terms of song coverage and sound quality. Users have access to more than 1m songs streamed at up to 320kbit/s (the broadly accepted upper bound for MP3 sound quality), which are moreover free of charge. Such premium content is otherwise only offered to paying users using other players such as Tencent’s QQ Music. This cloud-based app allows users either to play their favorite songs online or to download them onto local storage.
NetEase Cloud Music enables users to search for music by singing, humming or otherwise playing a song, an innovative feature we believe exclusively provided by NetEase on mobile devices. Our tests revealed generally high accuracy from such modes of search, revealing an advanced voice recognition technology inside the product.
With the mobile music app market being an area of intense competition amongst incumbent players such as Duomi Music, Kugou Music and Tencent’s offering , we regard NetEase Could Music’s embrace of social as something of a breakthrough. First of all, users have a personal page on the platform to share their musical interests and profile, songs played recently and “songs I like” playlists. Users can follow and interact with each other. The activities of users such as the adding of a favorite song or the sharing of a playlist become entries in the news stream. To expedite the creation of a friends network around a user, the app supports the importing and inviting of friends from mobile phone contacts, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. A location-based social function is also available to users to make friends within the vicinity. In addition, NetEase introduced hundreds of celebrities onto the platform.
We view NetEase Cloud Music as a mix of an interest-based non-real ID social networking comparable to Douban on one hand, and a social media platform similar to Sina Weibo on the other.