Migration: Xiami to Ximalaya [China only]

Unfortunately, Xiami is officially going offline and February 2 is the last day for the platform. This really sucks for me since it was my depository for all my works here in China.

I dreaded the day I would have to upload them again. I guess you need to expect this with the internet. It's always changing after all. If Soundcloud went offline, it would really be a sad day.

So we have begun our search for the new platform to be graced with our tracks. I was against Ximalaya before because I was not pleased with their encoding. But upon recent listen, they must have fixed their codec because I don't hear any distortion etc. from uploaded files.

I have recently gotten an artist account with QQ Music which is the largest (one of the largest?) music platform in China, but it just seems too restrictive with their license agreements. But I guess that's what you need to do to survive. You need to grant them exclusive rights to host your music for 3 years even for free tracks. I am still doing more research on this but as far as I know, you cannot upload the track on other platforms for 3 years. How they will check this I don't really know, but it just seems like there are too many strings attached.

XImalaya is a popular podcast platform and less of a hassle to deal with for artists. I found before that I had more interaction with people on this platform as its less flashy and more for people looking for something new to listen to that isn't based on music. No frills. I also found out that you can upload images and text along with your audio file but I have yet to try it out. In any case, you just upload your tracks and that's it really. No fuss, no muss. You don't get paid per listens but we can figure that out later as the year goes on.

So as of now, I am starting to upload our stuff on Ximalaya and see how things make out in a few months.

Thanks for listening!