Tencent Music Entertainment
Membership experience and monetization strategy for music streaming product.
When music is largely undifferentiated across services and often free, what makes a streaming platform worth paying for?
A membership experience should go beyond “ad-free listening” alone. It should be a portfolio of value propositions designed around different listener motivations: expert guidance for discovery, effortless listening in context, personal memory, and closer access to artists.
In the 12 weeks program, I led a research, strategy and experience design program for Tencent Music Entertainment to create valuable streaming service experience in music catalog. Combining a quantitative analysis of 800 persons with one-month of ethnographic in-depth research across major culture circle in China, we identified distinct reason and value people enjoy music streaming service and why they pay.
The work translated human behaviors by our observation into four listener archetypes, five experience principles, and a portfolio of membership concepts spanning curation, personalized discovery, listening memory, contextual experiences, and fan participation.
Challenge
Our brief focused on three questions: (1) What experiences are valuable enough to be worth paying for? (2) How does the existing membership match, or fail to match people’s needs? (3) What design strategy and signature moments should we develop for the music streaming platform?
For a leading streaming music platform, the challenge was not simply attracting more listeners. It was understanding why different people would choose to pay, stay with the service with loyalty. The outcome should not merely provide solutions, but also enable internal alignment and an insight-driven mindset in client team, both of which are essential to developing successful product and investment strategies.
Solution
The outcome combined market and business model research with an 800-person quantitative study and in-depth interview with 16 participants across Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and other major cultural markets. Quantitative segmentation was synthesized with diary studies, ethnographic observation, and interviews to reveal two major behavioral tensions like control versus exploration, and individual versus social listening. These patterns became four behavioral archetypes : Curator, Explorer, Companion, and Fan. Each archetype imply definitions of value and willingness to pay.
Through co-creation workshops with client’s product and design teams, we evaluated opportunities against user value, brand fit, existing capabilities, and investment priorities. Five directions were developed into interactive concept prototypes and tested with relevant user groups. The outcome focus on content curation, natural language input, user history, and fan economy.
Impact
The design opportunity were taken forward internally as inputs for subsequent product and experience development.
Several of these features also became increasingly visible in TME's product strategy over the following years: In 2021, TME expanded fan–idol communities and reported growing penetration and retention in its social music experiences. In 2022, QQ Music upgraded personalized playlists and smart recommendation to simplify music discovery, while expanding interactive concerts and virtual social experiences. By 2024, recommendations generated nearly 40% of streams in one quarter. SVIP passed 10 million subscribers, with premium audio and in-car privileges identified as key growth drivers. As result, several opportunity spaces identified in the research later became important across TME's membership ecosystem. These later developments are shown as retrospective context, not as outcomes directly attributed to this project.
About
Tencent Music Entertainment
Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), controlled by Tencent Holdings, is China’s leading music and audio platform behind QQ Music, Kugou, Kuwo, and WeSing. Its ecosystem reaches over 500M monthly music users, with 127M paying subscribers across streaming, karaoke, live entertainment, and social music experiences.