KKBOX music service expands in Asia-Pacific

The ceremony of launching new product stands for KKBOX and Hutchison Telecom's close cooperation and bring the best music experience to the market.


Taiwan’s largest music subscription service, KKBOX, today announced the expansion of its unlimited music download service for PC, iPhone and Android-based phones in Hong Kong with Hutchison Telecom.

Backed by big-name investors and local telecom giants, the investor roster of KKBOX includes US-based Adobe, Japan’s Orix Group, and local telecom giant Chung-Hwa Telecom.

KKBOX initially launched in Taiwan during 2005 and quickly emerged as the most popular music service in Taiwan, acquired over 4.5 million registered users and 340,000 premium service subscribers. Given Taiwan’s 13 million Internet population and high digital piracy traffic, KKBOX was a phenomenal success.

KKBOX offers its premium subscription at the price of NT$149 per month in Taiwan and HK$65 in Hong Kong, in which subscribers can stream music online and cache songs on their PC and Smartphone for offline access. Unlike the US and European music services which emphasizes on the Ad-Sponsored free streaming model, KKBOX only offers limited free streams per day to its non-paying members. In contrary, the service uses a rich collection of editorials, exclusive artist interview, entertainment news and community features to attract and keep free users attached to the service without paying excess copyright royalty.

“KKBOX is unique in a way that it is not only a software that finds you music, it is also an entertainment newspaper, a pop-music magazine, and a community for music lovers. The essence of a successful subscription service is to let your members feel privileged, you will find that element throughout our service,” the company chairman Lambert Chien said.

A very unique feature of KKBOX, which has not been seen in other music service is that for each song a user plays, the song lyric is displayed line-by-line in the “Karaoke” style. “Karaoke is a major leisure activity for Asians, especially for Chinese. People listen to new songs and often have sing-along needs so they can practice for an impressive performance in front of friends during a Karaoke gathering. We think this is absolutely a critical feature so we have it not only on PC, but also for our iPhone and Android version,” said Chien.

Taiwan is known as the pop-music center for Chinese, producing over half of the most popular pop-music stars and hit songs. KKBOX will expand its footprint to other Asia-Pacific regions, including Singapore, Malaysia and China during 2010, according to the company.