No more free Internet tunes

China's online music industry, currently fighting for survival, plans to start charging Internet users for music downloads within a few months, insiders told the Global Times Wednesday.

"Music, Internet and telecommunications companies have all reached a consensus about online music downloads. We expect the pay model to become a reality within a few months," Lu Jian, secretary-general of the working committee on records at the China Audio & Video Association (CAVA), told the Global Times Wednesday.

CAVA, which has hundreds of members in the audio-video industry, is the society that successfully pushed karaoke bars to start paying royalties on music videos in 2007.

Lu said the main proponents of the new music download model are Internet music companies, which are now struggling to keep afloat.

Also Wednesday, Yahoo China announced that it will shut down its music service for China on January 20, 2013 as part of an "adjustment" to its product strategy.

And in September of this year, Google Inc decided to close its music search service for the world's second largest economy after working for three and a half years with Chinese music website top100.cn to provide free and legal music in China.

"If China can't establish an online pay model, I'm afraid that the whole music industry in the country will collapse," said Lu, noting that after years of providing free music downloads to attract users, Internet companies have found that income from advertising is not enough to cover operational expenses.

Baidu and Tencent declined to comment on the issue when contacted by the Global Times, but both stated that they currently still provide free music downloads.

However, a senior executive at a music website, who refused to be named, told the Global Times that the website is worried about losing users if it begins to charge.

Internet users can easily find websites offering free music downloads. According to Netease Inc, nearly 90 percent of the Internet users it surveyed between December 3 and December 17 said they are not willing to pay to download music.

"People pay for movies, books and TV. Why is music an exception? It's totally unfair," a record industry insider told the Global Times on condition of anonymity, noting that nowadays many musicians view recorded music primarily as a platform to earn fame, because "performances and advertising have become their main sources of income."

"The situation is bad for the industry as a whole, because musicians don't want to put as much effort and concentration into their work as in previous years," the insider said.

Moreover, according to the insider, record companies usually accept whatever Internet companies are willing to pay in royalties, because lawsuits for violating music copyrights yield relatively little compensation compared with the sums invested in producing music.

"The royalties range from none to thousands of yuan, depending on the quality and quantity of music. Such a small amount of money is not reasonable, because creating excellent music takes investment," said the insider.

Zhang Yadong, a famous music producer, was quoted Wednesday by the State-owned news agency China News Service as saying that he does not have the confidence to make music anymore, since copyright protection conditions are bad and many people only care about singers from TV talent shows.