WorldMusic

China

East Asia

China became the world's fourth-largest recorded-music market in 2025, growing roughly 20% year over year and overtaking Germany per IFPI's 2026 report. Tencent Music Entertainment — operating QQ Music, KuGou and Kuwo — controls around 60% of the market with about 119 million paid subscribers, while NetEase Cloud Music runs a more indie-leaning community of roughly 44 million paying users. Foreign streamers are structurally walled off, so the C-pop ecosystem is essentially self-sustaining. Jay Chou and Hua Chenyu remain the biggest singular names; idol groups and anime music fill in around them.

Top domestic tracks

Top foreign tracks

Generational / regional / economic split

Urban younger listeners spread their time across long-running headliners like Jay Chou and Hua Chenyu, idol acts, anime tie-ins and a thick indie scene that lives mostly on NetEase. Teen and twenty-something women lean toward boy-idol groups in the TFBoys / Times Youth League lineage, while a male skew runs toward Chinese hip-hop, with Higher Brothers as the original breakout reference. Older listeners in smaller cities tend to stick with classic Mandarin pop, Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) reissues and red-song repertoire. K-pop reaches China mostly through unofficial channels because Korean acts have limited approval to release domestically.

Sources

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Music born in China

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