Xiami Music

» see xiami.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

xiami sat behind the same chinese-internet boundary that has always kept the mainland consumer web a separate room for people outside it. i never opened an account. even if i had wanted to try it from ankara the licensing wall would have blocked most of the catalog, and the discovery ui was chinese-only for its whole life. the way i learned xiami existed at all was english-language music blog coverage that treated it as the mainland alternative to spotify.

the service launched in 2006 as a small project by wang hao and a group of chinese developers. it opened public listening in the following couple of years and grew through the late 2000s into one of the more curated chinese music platforms of the era. the ui had a detailed tagging system for genres and sub-genres, which gave xiami a reputation among chinese indie listeners as the platform where you could actually find the record you were looking for. it also had a paid tier and an editorial voice, which put it ahead of most of its early competitors on the discovery side.

alibaba acquired xiami in january 2013 as part of a larger move into digital music. for the first years under alibaba the service kept its curation identity, hosting release announcements from independent chinese labels and building a following inside the mainland indie scene. by around 2018 the market shape had shifted. tencent's music unit and netease cloud music had consolidated the mass market by locking exclusive licensing deals with major labels. alibaba's music strategy tilted toward its parent's own copyright pool and away from consumer streaming.

~ the case file ~

~ the license war ~

the chinese streaming market in the second half of the 2010s ran on exclusive licensing agreements. the big domestic labels signed with tencent. netease built its own catalog with a different set of partners. xiami sat between them without the licensing budget to compete. its share of the mainland streaming market dropped through 2018 and 2019, and by 2020 it was reportedly at about two percent, well behind the four biggest apps.

~ how it actually ended ~

alibaba posted the shutdown notice on 5 january 2021. the actual service ran for one more month. on 5 february 2021 the app stopped playing music. the domain became a farewell page. the goodbye message translated as "goodbye, xiami, after your twelve-year companionship", pointing users toward a b2b music-licensing service called yinluo for restaurants and stores. the consumer product was closed for good, no acquirer, no migration into the surviving alibaba media brands.

~ what got buried with it ~

chinese indie music was the loss. mainstream artists were on other platforms and their catalogs survived. the small-label releases and out-of-print rarities that xiami's tagging system had made findable did not always exist on the successor apps. some of them still do not. in the last week of january 2021 chinese social feeds filled with users posting screenshots of their xiami playlists, hundreds of songs at a time, most of which had no clean migration path to any of the surviving streamers.

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