Music downloading booming in China

Here’s a newsflash – the Chinese market for well, everything, is growing rapidly and will be increasingly valuable for manufacturers and service providers. Nothing shocking there, I hope, but market research firm In-Stat has put some numbers to it when it comes to portable music devices and music downloading.

There is a problem in China (and everywhere else, for that matter) with illegal music piracy, In-Stat predicts that the market for legal online music downloading in China will reach $222 million by 2008. They feel confident of this because of the emergence in 2005 of several third party music providers and the decision by several grey-area providers to legitimize their offerings.

Of course, the growth of music downloading depends largely upon the proliferation of portable music devices. In-Stat predicts that there will be more than 100 million devices in use in China by the end of 2007. This, along with a crackdown on illegal music and the spread of 3G technology will allow legitimate downloading to grow.