KKBox

KKBOX

Type of business	Private
Founded	October 2004 (2004-10)
Headquarters	Taipei, Taiwan
Country of origin	Taiwan
Founder(s)	Chris Lin, et al
CEO	Chris Lin
Industry	Music
Services	Music streaming
Parent	KDDI (76% common stock)
Website	www.kkbox.com
Users	10 million+
Launched	October 2004
Current status	Active
Native client(s) on	Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, etc

KKBOX is a music streaming service developed by KKBOX Inc., a software company in Taipei from 2004.^[1] It is a part of Japanese Telecom Group, KDDI. The service area mainly targeting the music market of Southeast Asia, focusing on regions including: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, etc. Working on a freemium basis, both "pay-per-month" buyers or free service listeners can listen to over 20-million tunes (kkbox) on smartphones, TVs, media centers and computers.^[2]

As a Taiwan-based music streaming software, KKBOX caters mainly to Mandarin-speaking users by collaborating with record companies in the Taiwanese music industry. Major companies like Gold Typhoon, East Asia Music are some of their partners.^[3] KKBOX also has close links with Taiwanese artists, and mainstream Mandopop artists like Jay Chou and Mayday.

Development

After launching KKBOX in Taiwan, the company expanded the music streaming service to Hong Kong and Macau in 2009, Japan in 2011, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand in 2013 with the ambition of expanding to international markets.^[4] Starting from 2011, KKBOX received investment from KDDI Corporation,^[5] a Japanese telecom who occupied 76% of the stocks, HTC Corporation, a smartphone company and GIC, a Singaporean fund. Telecom partners of Hong Kong KKBOX are 3 and SmarTone.^[6]

Since its establishment, KKBOX has opened up supporting platforms through different applications of internet installment. There are Windows (Windows 2000 or later version), Windows Media Center, Mac OS X, IOS, Android, Symbian, Bada and partly Java’s phone.^[7] KKBOX has started to support Apple Watch since 2015.^[8]

Since 2014, KKBOX has established a live show "KKBOX x LIVE" for the users with first-hand experience or enjoys the live on the KKBOX app.^[9]

In 2006, the first KKBOX Music Awards ceremony was held in Taiwan. It is one of the music events in Asia with awards generated based on It has held for 11 years, in which various artists perform and are honoured including Eason Chan, Jay Chou, Jolin Tsai, Apink, Sekai No Owari and so on.^[10] In January 2017, KKBOX announced the winners of its 12th Annual KKBOX Music Awards.^[11]

Audience Reception

In 2008, KKBOX dominated the market with 80% market share. In 2015, KKBOX announced that over the past ten years of operation, the cumulative users of KKBOX have reached over 10 million of people, counted up to over 1600 registered artists and celebrities.^[12]

According to the research music information behaviour and system preferences of university of students in Hong Kong by HKU, Respondents gave a variety of responses regarding their most frequently visited music services: YouTube (51.5%), KKBox (26.7%), and iTunes (14.9%) were the most popular ones. The level of satisfaction for KKBox was lower than that of YouTube. Nearly half of the participants who use KKBox were satisfied with the relevance of results (48.1%), advanced search function (44.4%) and content-based search function (44.4%). The aspects of KKBox that participants did not like included the lack of accessibility (37.0%), content-based search function (29.6%), and auto-correction (29.6%). The content-based search function in KKBox was controversial among the participants. Some participants liked it due to the novel feature that few music services had; while others were not satisfied with it, perhaps due to fact that current performance of audio content-based technologies have yet to meet users’ expectation.^[13]

Controversy over copyright

In 2007, KKBOX was suspected of reproducing musical works and allowed its members to download them without authorization. The works included three hundred and twenty-four songs owned by HCM Music and a songwriter, Chan Kien Ming respectively. KKBOX’s owner and manager were prosecuted by Taipei District Prosecutors Office.^[14] In 2009, the court held that the case was considered as a civil dispute and the defendants are acquitted.^[15]

Awards

References