Lyons on China and the Future of Music Streaming

Quartz talked to Robert Lyons, founder and principal of strategic consulting company R.S. Lyons & Associates and an affiliated faculty member in the Marketing Communication department, for the latest installment in Because China, their video series about how China is changing the world.

In “China is changing how we listen to music,” Lyons predicts that the future of music streaming will be more thoroughly integrated into other online platforms.

“In China, it was always part of the platform from the get-go,” Lyons tells Quartz. “So you had Baidu, a search engine, launching a music stream; you had Tencent, which is actually a gaming company and a social media company, launching music; you had Alibaba, which is an ecommerce company, launching music.

Right now in music streaming, the most successful monetization is a company like Tencent Music, which is making that money, but not necessarily from music subscriptions, but from these value-added services to these other social media-driven services.”

Quartz also visited Lyons’s Business Policy and Strategy class this spring to shoot B roll.

The Because China series is behind a paywall, but view a trailer for the piece (Quartz subscribers can watch it in its entirety).