Tencent Music Entertainment Group, the leading online music and audio entertainment platform in China, today announced its unaudited financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022.
We delivered a healthy 18% year-over-year growth in subscription revenues with paying users exceeding 80 million in the first quarter, as supported by our dual engine content-and-platform strategy. Despite the headwinds in an evolving market landscape, which resulted in a year-over-year decline in total revenues, our efforts to optimize cost structure and improve operating efficiency led to improved profitability quarter-over-quarter," said Mr. Cussion Pang, Executive Chairman of TME. "In an era of increasing entertainment choices, the ability to sustain a competitive advantage is awarded to those who offer users a differentiated experience. We are encouraged by the increasing benefits our original content production investments and Tencent Musician Platform have brought to our users, musicians and the overall content ecosystem. With these initiatives, we continue to make critical investments that align with our long-term strategic goals and create sustainable value for all our music stakeholders."To get more tencent news, you can visit shine news official website.
"In the first quarter, we continued to build an immersive music entertainment ecosystem, bringing music lovers innovative possibilities for how they listen, watch, sing and play. With the goal of creating a sense of belonging that makes our products a must-have, we look for ways to address the multi-faceted needs of diverse user cohorts," said Mr. Ross Liang, CEO of TME. "In the first quarter, we further strengthened our cooperation with Tencent's ecosystem in content production and promotion, with the rewards becoming increasingly manifest. In addition, our long-form audio continued to gain traction thanks to differentiated content, and we are working on improving its monetization efficiency mainly through memberships. Moving forward, we will continue to make our ecosystem, content, products and services differentiated and highly specialized. This, in turn, will help us better serve hundreds of millions of music lovers, music creators and the music industry as a whole, and unlock the massive opportunity in front of us," concluded Mr. Liang.
The year-over-year decline in online music mobile MAUs was primarily due to churn of our casual users and reduced marketing spending required by our more disciplined cost management. However, online music paying users continued to deliver robust year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter growth, reaching 80.2 million, which was attributable to our high-quality content and services, effective promotions, as well as improvement in paying user loyalty.
Social entertainment services MAUs and paying users were lower year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, affected by industry and macro headwinds. We will continue to improve our competitiveness through ongoing product innovations and new initiatives in social entertainment such as audio live streaming, international expansion and virtual interactive product offerings.
We remained committed to strengthening our original content production capabilities, to systematically create, evaluate and promote music.
With Xingyao Plan and Galaxy Plan, we empower original content production by leveraging technology to add value across demo and singer discovery throughout the phases of production, distribution and promotion for these original works. In the first quarter, we delivered dozens of original hit songs to a broad audience, including "Mirage" and "Drown," two sweeping successes that topped multiple music charts and both achieved peak daily streams in excess of 13 million.
We achieved top rankings for our original content in key verticals such as gaming, Chinese Ancient Style and pop music. In the first quarter, we collaborated with Tencent Games' popular titles, including PUBG Mobile, Honour of Kings, League of Legends: Wild Rift to produce chart-topping original songs by leading artists such as Hua Chenyu, Chen Linong, Mao Buyi and Z.TAO.
Tencent Musician Platform cultivates budding musicians by providing them with all-round services to help showcase their talent and passion.
Established sustainable and diverse monetization models for musicians, which helps them earn a better living while focusing on honing their craft, as demonstrated by the distribution of over RMB200 million from our platform to musicians during the past 12 months.
Launched a new behind-the-scenes producer service, with more than 50 well-known industry professionals and more than 100,000 creators joining in the first quarter, as well as a customized self-service productivity toolkit to empower musicians to create and promote their works more efficiently and reach a larger audience.
Motivated aspiring talents with diverse creative scenarios and rich online and offline promotion resources, driving accelerated professional growth and broader recognition for musicians such as Liu Shuang and Georgina Qian.